Wedding Planning

In my last entry, I promised upcoming tales of planning, packing, learning Italian, and stranding the waverunner.

Since then, my life has been filled with the woes of a difficult financial market, packing, and making the worst meat pies in London for Halloween, complete with fingers and bones sticking out of them.

Because of that, I'll be cramming the remaining stories into one abreviated blog tapped out on my iPhone keypad while waiting for our plane to arrive.

PLANNING

I have to tell those of you getting married for a second time, that we've discovered the near-perfect solution for wedding-planning simplicity ... hold the wedding in a foreign country.

We've hired a wedding coordinator - Ben Singleton of ItalyWeddings.com - to help with all the gory details. He's been helping us gather and translate all the appropriate paperwork and he'll be driving us at break-neck speed through the streets of old Florence, next week, to all the various agencies and consulates to file a myriad of papers. He's arranging the Siena town hall, the official, the witnesses (we're picturing an 80-year old couple who've been married for 100 years who attend all of the weddings, christenings, and funerals in town), the translator, the photographer, the videographer, the harpist, the flowers, and a dinner at a fine local restaurant with enough food to kill us. Ben has been terrific to work with, and he's left us with few worries short of showing up.

I'm not condoning those of you happily married friends leave something good for the experience, and I think the first-time wedding planners owe it to themselves to go deeply into debt to hold a ridiculously big wedding with 17 bridesmaids and 500 guests and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, just for the shear right of passage, but the rest of you ... give it some thought ... you won't be sorry.

PACKING

Packing stinks. I hate it. But I do have a cool new camera bag. I like the camera bag.

This is an area where I will happily report that Nancy's skills are vastly superior to my own. She was fully packed three weeks ago. I have escaped the Trostle curse of not being able to begin packing before 9PM the night before the flight, but I will admit to leaving a few too many details to the end. This time, I blame my friends Freddie, Fannie, Lehman & WaMu. It's not really their fault, but it makes me feel better when I blame them

COMPETITIVE ROSETTA STONE (TACKLE ... NOT TWO-HAND-TOUCH)

Last time we went to Italy, we took a community college course in speaking Italian. We learned how to say "what a dirty old man" ("che vecchio porco"), and "I would like a room with a bathroom" ("voglio un pizza con pepperoni"), but we really didn't learn the language beyond the phrases.

Enter Rosetta Stone. Rosetta stone is a brilliant system in which you learn language like a three-year-old. They show a picture of three plates and you hear or read or select or (eventually) say or type "tre piatti." Soon enough, it all sinks in and you're speaking something that passes for Italian. You also learn a bunch of words you're likely never going to use while travelling (of course, if you know the word for "Horse," you'll never accidentally order "cavallo" on "il menu." The drawback of this system is that it often makes you feel like a three-year-old trying to figure out the picture and phrase and just what it all means. A photo of a kid and his mother looking affectionate with a phrase that loosely translates "I want good for my mother," left me scratching my head. I'm pretty sure the theory is that the more frustrated you get the less chance you'll forget that stupid phrase. Either that, or the Rosetta Stone folks are masochistic jerks who enjoy torturing people remotely.

Well, Nancy - who claims that learning a language doesn't come naturally to her - has taken a shine to Rosetta Stone. She is like 500 sections ahead of me, particularly while Freddie and I have been burning the midnight oil at work. When I do get the time, I have to bodily drag her from the iMac to get my own time learning the language. Hopefully, as her language skills have advanced, she'll be kind enough to keep me from ordering "cavallo" at dinner.

THE WAVERUNNER STORY

I was going to just skip this story, claiming the plane is boarding and I have to go, but seeing that I've put a picture from that day at the top of this entry, I suppose I owe it to you to at least briefly tell the story ... I can't do the story full justice in the time I have, but I'll give you the gist of it ..,

At the end of our August trip to Ocean City, because I was leaving for L.A. the next day, Nancy and I took our only full day alone to put our WaveRunner in the water and plan a big adventure. We decided to make our way down to Chincoteague island, a good 40+ miles from our starting place at Ocean Pines. The wind was like 1 knot, and the water was glass smooth, making for a magical and fast trip down. We stopped at a sandbar, hunted hermit crabs, and had a picnic that couldn't be beat. That's the calm and happy picture above. Then, we decided to head back ... "but not before we take a loop through Tom's Cove," I said ... stupidly (although at that moment it didn't sound like a stupid plan).

Well, long story short, at 20mph, I suddenly noticed the sand was very very close to the top of the water, and the WaveRunner stopped in its tracks ... feeling not dissimilar to how roller coasters feel when they stop at the very end of the ride.

Frantic attempts to free the craft before the tide went out completely were fruitless. The picture looked much like the one above, only without the happy face, and with the WaveRunner 100 feet to the left, in the middle of the sandbar. The Coast Guard Auxiliary (Dale & Warren) came to our rescue, but could do nothing but wait for the tide to come back up, and sit and laugh with me (while I was on their boat) that my Fiancee (who was 100 yards away on the WaveRunner) would not forget this for a long, long, long, long time. So far, they're right.

One hour, 45 minutes later, we were freed by the rapidly rising tide, and made our way through 40 miles of the worst chop from the 15 knot winds.

In the end, it was a fantastic adventure that we both can look back on and laugh about. We arrived safely, and made it back in time for us to make our way home and for me to catch my flight the next morning.

We're hoping for better luck with our trip from Roma to Salerno on the train tomorrow ... we had trouble getting a train ticket in advance (system problems), but I'm hoping and expecting we'll be fine At least we're guarnteed less time stranded on a sand bar this time.

Next entry, from Italia.

Ciao! -M. Brent (& Nancy)