Monday, July 19, 2010

Wedding in the Woods

I went to wedding #3 of the year this past weekend. My old roommate, Lisa, married Joe in a seemingly random little clearing in Sitgreaves National Forest. The wedding was lovely and laid-back, much like Lisa and Joe, and it was super nice to have an excuse to go up to the mountains to escape the heat in Tucson.

My roommate Liz has been living in and working near Alpine, which is only about an hour away from the wedding site, so I drove the 5+ hours up to Alpine on Thursday night so I could hang out with her Friday. All last week it kept feeling like it should rain in Tucson, but tragically we haven't had any monsoons yet in town, so it's still been ridiculously hot (105-ish) plus the humidity normally associated with monsoons. Even though driving windy, hilly roads sucks in the rain, I was definitely glad to hit it. Rain is always welcome relief from the heat out here. The rain wasn't nearly as bad as I've seen past summers, and made for some pretty awesome rainbows.


We camped Friday and Saturday nights (it must be a fun wedding if camping is a totally feasible option right??), and spent some time Saturday wandering around the area. I'd never been to this part of Arizona before, and it turns out it's really pretty.


The wedding was beautiful and simple. It was so exciting to see Lisa and Joe get married. They went on their first date about a month after I moved in with Lisa (and other roommates, including 2 of my 3 current ones), and while I've been happy for all of my friends who've gotten married this year, there's something really neat and awesome about witnessing the relationship from the beginning. I guess it's reassuring to think that that random first date really could be with Mr. Right and lead to marriage.


As I mentioned, the wedding itself was in the middle of the national forest. Nobody would have found this on their own, so everybody met at the reception site and caravan-ed up to the site. It was quite funny to see all the guests traipsing through the woods like some strange renaissance procession.


At dinner those of us from the old house sat with a friend of Lisa's from JVC and one of her friends. They were super nice and fun to talk with, and conversation was definitely not lacking. But at some point we all overheard the funniest off-the-wall remark, and we all instantly looked at each other intrigued. One of Joe's brother's was at the next table, and said that apparently if you drink 40 non-alcoholic beers that you would blow a 0.08, making you legally drunk. Pretty quickly we started to ponder the feasibility of this, our first thought being simply with the time it would take you to consume 40 beverages your body would have certainly started processing any alcohol. Then we wondered if you even could drink 40 beers. The beers we had in front of us were 12 oz...with some rough conversions we realized that 40 12-oz beers would be nearly 4 gallons. Even if 40 non-alcoholic beers contain enough alcohol to make you legally drunk, you'd never actually be able to consume that volume. Amusing idea, but (sadly?) not feasible...

At the reception Lisa's friends from college sang her a song by the Old 97's - a band I guess she introduced them to. This song is super sweet and I may or may not have listened to it on repeat today...

On the drive home, I pulled over in Salt River Canyon a couple of times to snap some photos. The canyon is pretty impressive, and the very slow, very windy drive was much more interesting during my daytime drive home than my nighttime drive up. Crazy that this view is only about an hour and change from the lush green of the forest.

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