Kentucky Wedding - Part One, Rehearsal Dinner

At the end of May, DH and I traveled to middle-of-nowhere Kentucky for his brother's wedding.  It was a quick trip - arrived on Friday afternoon and left on Sunday morning.

Crazy thing about Kentucky - cell service there sucks.  I could only make calls and sometimes send or receive texts.  Apparently I wasn't getting all of my text messages, or if I did, it was hours after the person sent them.  There was no data service, and no GPS service either.  Which was really bad when we left the hotel on Sunday with no idea of where to go, and no GPS signal.  It resulted in a call to Pittsburgh to someone with a computer who read us the first couple of directions from Google maps until we could re-enter civilization closer to Lexington.

Anyway, a few hours after we arrived on Friday, it was already time for the rehearsal and dinner! The hotel that we stayed at was a five minute walk to the ceremony venue, which was great.

The ceremony was being held outside, on the enormous lawn of some historic building in the little town.  The first floor of the building held a whiskey museum, and then all of the other floors had completely random, unrelated business on them (I believe a school of some sort, legal offices perhaps, and then the top floor was a dining venue of some sort that they rented out for the dinner.)  Yes, the long brick walkway that you see in that picture above was the "aisle."  Crazy, right?

View from the steps of the building

I frequently forget how big I've gotten until I see pictures of myself

They served southern barbeque food for the rehearsal dinner and it was really good. I've recently developed an appreciation for pulled pork sandwiches and these did not let me down.  For that reason, there are no pictures.  I was starving and wasted little time in eating everything, which - in addition to the pulled pork - including fried chicken and mashed potatoes.  Yum.

There were speeches and gifts given out and all of that, but the room was really dark, so the majority of those pictures didn't turn out that great.  You can imagine though, right? Oh, and imagine that everyone else was drinking.  Oh, how I wanted to be drinking.....

Here's a funny one to end with though... I believe the prompt for this picture was "let's see your pregnant belly!"

There are a couple different versions of this photo out there, depending on who took it, and the angle that they were standing at.  DH clearly wins the prize in this particular photo although I hear his brother gave him a run for his money in some of the other versions. 

After the rehearsal dinner everyone went downstairs to the basement of the building, where there was a bar. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the bar in the random list of businesses in this building.) I stayed for about 15 minutes, but it was super crowded, I was carrying a ton of crap (my purse, my camera, DH's video camera, his groomsman gift, etc), it was super smoky, and super loud.  I don't think people were actually smoking IN the bar, but there were definitely at least 20 people standing right in the doorway smoking and they basically might as well have been smoking inside.  Plus it was so loud that you had to yell to talk to anyone, and when you're not drinking and totally sober, conversation is really all you've got left so I quickly got tired of just standing there holding stuff and decided to let the drinkers do their thing. 

I walked back to the hotel on my own, and on the way encountered some of DH's cousins who were taking a walk.  They walked back with me to the hotel and we hung out at this cute little sitting area that was outside of our block of rooms for an hour or so until I decided to go to bed. 

Up next, wedding day.