Today Lady Harriet Whimsy, who was featured on this blog playing the violin in a Famous Hat video, got married. I have known her since she was a delightful child, and now she is a beautiful young woman. The wedding is the entire reason Travalon and I have been traveling south all this time, although escaping from the cold was also a compelling reason.
I figured we wouldn't get a long walk in for my workout today, but our hotel has a pool, so I decided to swim laps for my workout. The pool was VERY warm, even more than the warm-water pool at our health club, and I could only manage nineteen minutes (was aiming for twenty) before giving up. But hey, my FitBit did give me credit for nineteen minutes of swimming, twenty-one laps, so that tells you how slowly I was going. Even the air in the pool area was warm (ironically, now that we are so far south that it's always hot, we finally encountered our first indoor pool on the trip), so it was hard to cool off. Out of curiosity I dipped a foot into the hot tub, figuring it must be boiling hot... and to my surprise it was a refreshing temperature, like you'd expect a pool to be, so I got in to cool off. It's like they switched around the temperature controls for the pool and hot tub. Travalon was loving having a giant hot tub to float in.
We showered and got ready and then drove to Ave Maria, Florida, a city built around a Catholic university founded by the guy who started Domino's Pizza. It's kind of fake-looking, being such a new city - it looks like one big resort with a Catholic church smack in the middle of it. Lady Harriet had asked me to sing with the choir, which was mostly made up of local university and high school students, but I sat next to a woman who graduated college a decade before I was born. There were microphones, which threw me, and the choir director asked me to go to the back row, so I figured she thought I sucked and should be away from the microphones, but I'm too short to see over those tall college girls, so I came back to the front and my older buddy. Anyway, I guess the choir director didn't hate my voice, because afterwards she said I was welcome to join them any time I was in town. One of the college students took this surprisingly good photo of me in the choir loft.
Rich, Travalon, and I took lots of photos for Kathbert, who didn't come to the wedding but requested photos. There's a really good one of the bride and groom surrounded by bubbles as they exited the church (we blew bubbles instead of throwing rice), but I forgot to ask her permission to post it. Here are some photos Travalon took of the inside of the church.
And the outside of the church.
It was a beautiful ceremony. The choir sang "If Ye Love Me" by Tallis, "Taste and See" by Ralph Vaughn Williams, and the Arcadelt "Ave Maria," and I got to sing in my natural range of soprano. I haven't sung in a choir in three years, but it has been much longer than that since I sang soprano instead of alto.
The reception was at a swanky resort called the Dell Webb Oasis.
I had a pretty sensible dinner, and fruits and vegetables for hors d'oeuvres, but both the bride and her father thanked me profusely for our wedding gift of baking sheets and cooling racks, which were not just on the registry but a "most wanted" item, because they used them to bake what seemed like six thousand kinds of cookies, and I had to sample quite a few of them. Plus there was cake. Here is a photo of Travalon and me at the reception.
See? We don't always look like we're just going out to the barn to feed the horses, only most of the time. I wore the tanzanite and opal ring I got on a cruise years ago, opal earrings, and the same necklace I'd worn for our wedding. Being at this wedding did bring back wonderful memories of ours.
Eventually the dancing started, and they played a Glenn Miller song ("In the Mood"), so I asked Lady Harriet's brother (who seemed to be in charge of the playlist) if there was any Benny Goodman. He checked and said no, but then he said he slipped "Sing Sing Sing" in there, so Travalon and I danced to all eight and a half minutes of it, joined by my goddaughter's mother and some of her younger children. (It was so good to catch up with her!) The children really enjoyed the golf and dodgeball simulator in another room, so she and I watched them and chatted awhile. People kept telling me how much they loved my dress - even a woman outside the church stopped me to tell me that! I do love it. Mama Step gave it to me because it didn't fit her anymore. I have to be careful or it won't fit me either!
On the way back to our hotel, Travalon and I stopped in the casino in Immokalee, where he had gone while I was at choir rehearsal before the wedding, and we got some Indian fry bread. Then he went to the bar across the street and found they had conch fritters, so he brought some back for me. Ah well, Lent is coming soon, and then I will fast.
Famous Hat
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