After The Wedding

After a wonderful evening reception at the Sherbrooke Church in Vancouver, we settled in for plenty of picture taking. Here we are with both sets of parents.

In spite of my poor driving record, I managed to rent a car, a vanilla 4-door Pontiac Parisienne, a version of my very first car, only 10 years younger. Being early October, we were fortunate to have no icy roads and we got there and back safely. We had a wonderful time riding the gondola, relaxing in the hot springs with snow cascading down, eating, and ....and.... I can't remember what else.

We arrived home after 10 days away, to a mountain of wedding gifts. We were overwhelmed and now we had to chose what we would take with us to Ocean Falls and what we would leave behind in storage. I remember being taken aback because I had not really considered this aspect of a wedding before. Friends and family were so very generous to us.

Here we are on the Northland Prince saying our farewells. Lis's mom and sister are looking on as she opens a gift from her little brother, a sketch he had made, of a lion cub, already framed and ready to hang in our new apartment. I think he was being clever in that he knew if he gave it to us on the boat we pretty much had to take it with us and not store it in some dusty basement for the next few years.

The wedding and honeymoon were experiences that would have overwhelmed me at the best of times, but after having been isolated for so long, that old culture shock was kicking in. By the time we were leaving on the boat to return, I was back in my old 'groove', but now I was going back to isolation. The huge consolation was that I would not be alone and that we would not have family at hand to interfere or give us advice as newlyweds. This perhaps was needed many times, but we managed to work things out by ourselves and became stronger for it. If I had known how the trip back to OF was going to go, I would have stayed on dry land.