At the Beach I Saw...Weddings

Note: This is a short series about things I saw at the beach.

Last year we saw several weddings while we were at the beach, as you may remember. Because I know you remember everything I write about here. If not, you can go back and read about it. I’ll wait.

This year, we hadn’t seen any weddings at the beach during our stay. On our last day there, which was a Friday, I even commented to Laura about how we hadn’t seen any weddings on this trip as we did last year. And then I didn’t think much more of it.

But then we stayed out at the beach later on Friday than we had on the other days. And as it was starting to get late in the afternoon, we saw some well-dressed people. Just like last year, they were rather conspicuous in how they weren’t dressed like everyone else for the beach. People with clothes on are quickly noticeable when everyone else is wearing swim trunks and bikinis, it seems.

We immediately guessed those people were there for a wedding, based on our previous experience. And then I noticed several white chairs with pink ribbons were set up. This wasn’t just going to be the bride, groom, minister, photographer, and kids from previous marriages as we had seen before. This wedding was going to have a real audience. There were probably 10 to 15 people there besides the small wedding party.

That wedding apparently went off without a hitch, except for the bride and groom getting hitched, of course. And then it was time for the wedding pictures, which seemed to take quite a while. Just like our wedding. Except that we weren’t at the beach for ours. If only we had known.

While they were doing all their typical beach wedding poses, we saw another group forming. This one didn’t have chairs, although they did have a table covered in a white tablecloth with a pink ribbon around it. So once again, we figured it was a wedding. Which it was.

Not to be outdone, there was yet another group not too far from where the first bride and groom were still posing for pictures. But this group turned out to be a large group. I’m never good at estimating crowd size, but this group appeared to have at least 30 or 40 people, if not more. No chairs for them - they all stood up for the whole thing. And then they all threw rose petals into the water. Interesting.

So on this trip, we went from seeing no weddings at all to seeing three weddings within an hour. That was even more than last year.

Hopefully, they aren’t all still waiting to get a wedding gift from us. Because, technically, we had gone to their weddings, after all.

Great, now we will be branded as bad wedding guests.