Well, I’m back! Not that you missed me much since I was posting while I was gone out of town (:
Our trip to Yellow Knife, North West Territories was great! I’ve never been that far north, it was pretty exciting to see everything that I’ve been told about the area and to have that bit of adventure. The drive up was the most interesting part of the trip, we were surrounded by the biggest bolts of lightening at one point. I remember praying “Lord, please keep us safe. And if you decide not to, help us to live through a lightening strike because that’d be pretty awesome”.
I had heard tons of horror stories about the amount of bugs in the north and so I wasn’t surprised when we would park the car and be bombarded by a herd (yes, a HERD) of mosquitoes and flies. We decided to sleep in the car the first night and had brought mesh to tape over the window so we could leave it open. Somehow the tape slipped off during the night and we woke up to several (ha, that’s a slight understatement!) bugs eating us. You could hear the swarm of mosquitoes at the window even though our heads were at the opposite end of the car. Awake at 3:30, we couldn’t get back to sleep and decided to continue driving.
Probably the biggest excitment on the way up was the siting of a young black bear (not unusal but still pretty cool) and herds wild buffalo. I’ve seen buffalo before, although the ones in our area aren’t wild, but these ones were much much bigger than I’d ever seen.
We were going to Yellow Knife for a friends wedding and so the weekend was stuffed full of wedding prep and family visiting. Decorating the wedding ceremony and reception hall was something else. The bride had said she had been overwhelmed by the planning, but I looked around and couldn’t understand what she had done. There were no decorations at the ceremony, like…none…and if it hadn’t been for her new mom-in-law there would have been no table clothes at the reception hall. Matter of fact, the only thing that decorated the reception hall was the centre pieces which consisted of three roses and some babies-breath per table.
The new sister-in-law and I decided to take charge and help this bride out. We pulled several fake trees from the rest of the church into the ceremony hall, covered big baskets and old milk urns with white flowing fabric and put ivy in them, flowing down the sides. Then we went to Wal-Mart and bought some cheap fabric that matched the napkin colors (the napkins were bought days before by the new mom-in-law, otherwise there wouldn’t have been any at all), cut the fabric into 1.5 meter pieces and tied them around the back of the bridal parties chairs.
The flowers were another story. I knew I should have gone with the guys to the florist, I just had this feeling they were going to be screwed over and I was so right. The groom ended up paying $800.00 for 9 table centre pieces (like I said above, each with three roses and a bit of babies-breath), the main table centre piece, two bouquets and 5 boutonnieres. I couldn’t believe it. I wish I had lived closer to the bride so I could have helped her out some more…I could have even just given her more ideas on decorating. To make the price of the flowers even more shocking, the florist hadn’t even started on the flowers until the night before and the groom had to pick them up at 8 in the morning…even though the pictures started at 9am. If I had known the flowers were going to cost this much and cosist of so little, I would have offered to go to Safeway, buy some roses, and do all of them up for the bride at a quarter of the price.
On that note: If anyone is getting married, I’d love to hear about it! If you’re looking for fun, money saving ideas, let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can come up with. First come, first served!
Now I’m back in town, exhausted and getting ready to go to the Farmers Market this weekend. I can’t wait, even though I’m going to need the sleep, it’s going to be worth it!
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