Rehearsal Dinner

While we were driving southward, Arlene got a couple of cell phone calls from my stepsister Luanna, the mother of the bride. One was just making sure that we were getting there OK, and the other was to say that we were invited to meet at the groom’s family’s house (we had directions to it) for the rehearsal dinner that evening around five. Since we weren’t in the wedding party per se we thought it was a bit much to go to the rehearsal dinner, but we left the inn and got to the house a little after five.

That whole area of Virginia is Civil War battlefields. There was a battle at Fredricksburg itself. On the way to Locust Grove we went through the Chancellorsville battlefield, through Spotsylvania, and through the Wilderness battlefield. I’m not a Civil War buff, but I still would have liked to see the exhibits at the various visitor centers and gotten a better idea of what had gone on there.

It turned out (though it wasn’t obvious even after we got there) that there was no restaurant in the picture, rather a big buffet at the house; so it felt just fine appropriate for us to be there.

The house was fairly new, big but not a monster house, mostly one story but with dormer windows showing that there were some reasonable rooms upstairs.

It was full of antique or at least collectible stuff. The kitchen had a hand-cranked telephone that had been retrofitted with a rotary dial so it rang (loud!) and could make outgoing calls. There were musical instruments all around the living room, mandolins hanging on the walls, something from Afghanistan with sympathetic strings like a sitar, a banjo-like instrument from Turkey.

The groom’s mother breeds Arabian horses. She designed the stable herself, after asking all her friends, “If you could rebuild your stable, what would you change?”

It has a center aisle wide enough to drive a truck through for unloading feed and hay, a stall with a movable wall so it can be two stalls or one big enough for a mare and foal, space to put in a bathroom, and more.

Here we have the womenfolk of the wedding party, my stepsister Luanna, mother of the bride; my mom, step-grandmother of the bride, Elyse, bride; Walda, mother of the groom; and Walda’s mom.

Luanna and her husband Ed, aka parents of the bride. They live in Spokane, WA.:

My other stepsister Lara and Luanna. Lara lives in Las Cruces NM. The rest of her family didn’t come because of the expense.