planning

Will you marry us?

I have recently discovered that one cannot have a civil wedding at the John Marshall Courts building in Richmond, VA.

My conversation with the woman staffing the phone on the marriage extension went something like this:

Me: Hi, um, I was trying to get more information about bringing a camera in if I wanted to get married by a Justice of the Peace at the Circuit Court.

Staff Member: Well, you can’t get married here. There is no one who will marry you.

So now, here we are. We have a date (May 24th!) and a photographer (for about two hours). We have no venue or officiant. I’m glad I checked up on this now instead of later.

This puts a slight dent in our plans because we were all ready to be married by a Justice of the Peace with very little pre-planning of the ceremony. It’s not just that we don’t have an officiant or venue; it’s that we now have to come up with a ceremony. I never really dreamed of my wedding, but, of course, I have had two niggling fears of my wedding day for a very long time: (1) rain on an outdoor ceremony [Cue Alanis!] and (2) having to say private, emotional things in front of others.

To us, this means no unity candle, no readings, no music, no processional/recessional, no greeting line, no flower girl (Ha, like  I would willingly place myself in the presence of a young child, hahahahahaa!). Just the important things that must be said to make the marriage official. It’s not that I want to get it over with; I just don’t want to feel forced to say things unnaturally or work with an officiant who has strong feelings about how the ceremony needs to go.

“I want it to be official,” says Harrison, “But I don’t want it to be dumb. I don’t want any actions, just words.” [Note: Weddings that have these things aren’t dumb, but it would be dumb to have them out of a sense of obligation only.]

I guess I will continue to consult the Internet, clearly the best source of information, as well as respectable married people about the necessary parts of a wedding ceremony and how to find an officiant.

Fortunately, I just found this post about the five basic components required for a marriage ceremony in the US:

  • The statement : naming the people who have to be there
  • The intention : Do you ___ intend to marry ___? (I do.)
  • The vow : “I [name] take you [name] to be my lawfully wedded husband/wife.”
  • The signing
  • The declaration : “I now pronounce you…”

Those all sound like good, matter-of-fact things to include. I even like the vows–short and sweet and with no added fluff that would sound awkward coming out of our mouths.

So yes, we’re on the lookout for an officiant and a cool, cheap venue in Richmond, VA. To be continued….

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planning

We have a date and an air mattress.

After some deliberation, indecision, and wheedling, we have officially set a date to get married: Friday, May 24th, 2013We picked it for three reasons:

  1. Our anniversary will always fall on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend or slightly earlier. This will give us an excuse to take a great trip over the long weekend.
  2. Friday allows our gainfully-employed Richmond friends to celebrate with us without worrying about work the next day.
  3. Hiring someone to take snazzy pictures of us in a dress and bow-tie (plus other articles of clothing, of course!) is significantly cheaper on a Friday than the Sunday of a long holiday weekend.

 

Our plan is to get married in the morning with just our parents present. Then we’ll eat a tasty wedding lunch, spend the afternoon enjoying ourselves, and hang out with some close friends that night.

To be honest, all of my energy had previously been focused on planning a very long road trip: whom we would see, where we would go, what we would eat. However, it is pretty important to decide when and where and how we are actually getting married. So far, we have one of those bases covered. Yesssss.

It feels oddly satisfying to have an actual date that we are going to get married, even though I always knew it was going to happen. We aren’t sending Save the Dates or fancy, letter-pressed invitations. However, it’s the date that we have now decided upon, the one that works best for us this year and in future years, and the one we’re saying out loud to ourselves and to Bodger (who is clearly invested in this process) .

Hooray! Baby steps!

And in addition to a date, we also have a fancy new ALPS queen-sized air mattress.* Lauren, a blogging and Twitter friend, tipped me off that this baby was on-sale, and we snatched it up. It arrived yesterday, and I was eager to try it out.

Deflated ALPS queen air mattress

Once it was inflated, we made sure that it will accommodate different sleeping positions:
Inflated ALPS queen air mattress

 

My personal favorite:

Inflated ALPS queen air mattress

 

Also, Harrison wants me to put up this picture because he thinks it makes him look cool.

Harrison is cool

Thoughts?

 

Alright, that’s all I got for now. Check back soon for a post in which I solicit advice about selecting someone to be an officiant because apparently, our original plans of a courthouse wedding are no more.

 

*We are in no way affiliated with ALPS mountaineering products. We are not being paid to endorse their products by spreading ourselves luxuriously across them.

 

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information

A basic map + what about Bodger?

Many people have asked where we’re actually going on WVT. It helps no one if I just rattle off some dates, so it’s perhaps best to answer this in pictorial form. This is a map that Harrison drew up today. The red dots are cities that we are definitely planning on visiting. The black squiggles are stretches of route where we aren’t entirely sure what is happening.

Rough map of WVT

(Click to enlarge)

Others have asked if our flatulent Frenchie will be coming along for the ride. Bodger will sadly not be joining us on Wedding Victory Tour for three reasons. First, we don’t want to impose his presence/gas on our friends who are nice enough to open their homes to us. Second, not all hotels are dog-friendly, and we are trying to stick with one chain throughout the entire trip. Third, as a brachycephalic breed, Frenchies don’t do well in heat, so we wouldn’t be able to roll the windows down and hop out of the car for spontaneous sightseeing or meals. (Fourth, Bodger farts a lot in the car, so we might die of asphyxiation.)

Bodger in chair

Don’t feel too bad for him, though. He’ll be staying in the choicest accommodations at Château Lois, AKA my mom’s house, with her two dogs, Gryphon, the Briard, and Neville, the not-quite-all-there Old English Sheepdog. You should also not feel bad because Bodger is the least loyal of all creatures and would probably push me under a train if he thought it would advance his comfort in any way.

 

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planning

Planning the Tour Dates

When we first came up with the idea of WVT on a flight back from two friends’ wedding, I naively thought that it would be super-fun and super-easy to plan. Instead of having to make everything happen on Just One Day, we would easily be able to work around our friends’ and families’ schedules. In short, I thought this non-traditional wedding format would absolve me from the responsibility of making difficult wedding-related decisions. I was blindly saying “yes” to any and all possibilities and using the word “flexibility” to respond to any question beginning with when. Colorado? We’re there! Canada? No problem! When are you getting married? Oh, any time–we’ve got some flexibility! United Kingdom via amphibious vehicle? I’m sure that will happen!

Well, as it turns out (and this is perhaps surprising to no one who has seen my abysmal understanding of US geography), the United States is enormous, and planning a coordinated road trip around it is no easy task.

Planning a road trip is hard!

Profound thoughts by @mllemica

Sketching out WVT did involve a surprising amount of decision-making. We had to prioritize what was important for us to do. Visiting with friends always trumped seeing things like the largest ball of twine, and I put my foot down about maintaining a “grueling” pace for too many days at a time. And sadly, unless we want this road trip to stretch into the fall, we have to cut out the middle of the country and leave out Florida.

A few hours later and several dramatic sighs (mine) later, we ended up with this:

Wedding Victory Tour spreadsheet

 

Our strategy was to decide upon major cities where our friends are located and confirm that one was willing to host us. In between, we’ll stay in hotels and camp. Now begins the process of sending out a flurry of Save the Date(s) e-mails to coordinate seeing our friends and family spread far and wide across the continental US.

The tentative schedule has us leaving Richmond, VA (our hometown) on June 12th and returning between August 1st and 5th. That’s almost two months on the road–as I write this, I can almost hear my dad saying “Yechhhhh!” at the thought of being in the car that long.

We’ll try to get a “Tour Dates” page up in the next two weeks, and then we’ll be looking for suggestions for food, sights, and activities!

And, as it turns out, it was a lot more fun for us to plan when we’d get to see our friends–some of whom we haven’t seen in five years–than to worry about picking colors or negotiating venue fees. As WVT becomes a real thing, instead of just an ambiguous plan that we’ve kept to ourselves, I’m happy that its actual manifestation continues to be the best choice for us: a lot of fun, quality time with friends, and delicious food.

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information

Wedding Victory Tour FAQ by Harrison

Harrison's WVT FAQ

Harrison likes to ask questions and then answer them.

What is Wedding Victory Tour? Rather than hosting a large wedding ceremony and reception for all of our family and friends, Mica and I have decided to have a small courthouse ceremony with immediate family, followed by a cross-country (+ Canada!) roadtrip during which we will visit our various disparately-located family and friends.

Why the name “Wedding Victory Tour”? We needed something more interesting than “Wedding Roadtrip.”  Wedding Victory Tour seems the correct mix of epic and ridiculous.

Why don’t you want to have a traditional wedding, like normal people? We are rather abnormal people.  Namely, we would find spending the better part of two months bopping around in a car more enjoyable than hosting a massive party for family and friends.

What is wrong with parties? Nothing!  Given the choice, though, we would rather have many small gatherings with individual family and friends than one huge bash.

The thought of spending that long in the car with any one human being makes me ill. Please phrase in the form of a question.

Why in the world would anybody want to do this? We love travel, roadtrips in particular.  I (Harrison) love driving, and Mica loves passenger-ing.  We have driven back and forth from graduate school in Illinois to our parents’ houses in Virginia many times, and we recently completed a 2500-mile roadtrip around the middle of the country, so this ain’t our first rodeo, so to speak.  We are excited to see whether our astronaut diapers will hold up for the duration of this significantly longer journey.

When is this happening? We will set out in early to mid-June and make our triumphant return in late July or early August.

Where are you planning to go? Roughly, we are planning to make a counter-clockwise loop around the continental US, along with a bonus excursion to the Canadian maritimes. [Mica’s edit: I want to take WVT to the UK, but I’m pretty sure we can’t drive under the ocean. Womp, womp.]

Isn’t this rather environmentally unfriendly? Yes and no.  It will certainly have a significant carbon footprint, but so does flying.  A 10,000-mile trip in a reasonably fuel-efficient car emits about as much carbon as two passengers flying roundtrip from San Diego to Richmond, VA.  We have three family members in San Diego who would have likely been invited to a traditional wedding.

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