After the bowling/shopping we reconvened for our last event, an early dinner at Shelburne Farms. This 1,400 acre estate used to be a summer home for the Vanderbilts, complete with a farm house that rivals just about any mansion in America, a couple hundred room main house and a fantastic waterfront location. Part of the estate is now an inn with a pretty good restaurant housed in one of the grand old halls.

Those of us who made the unfortunate choice not to shop ended up at the local bowling lanes. I haven't bowled since I was a kid in Rhode Island playing duckpin bowling with my grandfather, but surprisingly a couple of our guests were really into it. Of course Somchai was uber-excited, since anything sports related thrills him to no end. We split up into gay and straight teams, and I'm pretty sure the gays won, although that part of the day is pretty fuzzy.

For the guests who were staying on, we planned a trip to Burlington, by far the largest city in Vermont (although tiny compared to just about anywhere else). The plan was to take a cruise around Lake Champlain,the enormous lake on Burlington's front door, that separates New York and Vermont and runs up to the Canadian border. Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate this time, and it was too windy for the boat to sail. We had to make up an impromptu Plan B, which for half the group meant shopping along Burlington's pedestrianized shopping district.

Sunday was a very laidback day. Most guests stayed for the farewell brunch at the hotel, which was delicious (our friend Amy apparently disagreed by the look on her face) and a very relaxing way to recover from hangovers and start the trip home. We also spent the morning wrapping up details. For example you can see Somchai pretending to listen to our wedding planner go through some details, after which he no doubt said he didn't know and she should talk to me.

From the photos it looks like we took the faux trollies up to the art gallery, which was somewhat garishly transformed into a Moroccan tent. Since people would be drinking for many more hours here, we arranged for another full dinner spread to be laid out, but since people had been eating and drinking for the six previous hours, there wasn't a lot of appetite for more food. Strangely, the guests did manage to squeeze in a lot more drinks though.

Shifted gears for dinner, leaving Thailand behind for a traditional New England dinner. The Pitcher Inn is really well known for its food and wine, and we had plenty of both. I think you're supposed to drink lightly on your wedding, but I remember being pretty liquoured up by the end of dinner, and a bit worried that we had another five hours of drinking and dancing still to come.

We took another twenty minutes out of the partying for family pics, a few of which are here. Stoli has been complaining about his photos in the last few entries, but I hope these meet with his approval. Actually everyone looks good in these photos (although pomme also looks drunk).

As the guests got drunk, we took some time off to get married a second time, this time in a Buddhist ceremony. Well, it was sort of a Buddhist ceremony adopted for Vermont and the absence of monks, which meant we mostly did the blessing part. Mom did the honors by putting those very fetching headpieces on us, then all the guests came by to bless our union and pour water over our hands.

We wanted to have some Thai entertainment, which generally consists of traditional dancers, drag queens and gogo boys. We opted for the more traditional route, but spiced it up a bit with transvestite dancers. Unfortunately, the supply of transvestite traditional Thai dancers is woefully thin in Vermont, so we ended up flying in a dance troupe from San Francisco to entertain the guests.

For some reason the easily accessible photos were heavily skewed toward this part of the event, so I've added an extra post to accomodate the photographic excess. This part of the day was Thai themed, with Thai snacks and Singha Beer accompanying (and probably conflicting with) the inn's fine wine and champagne. But the day was about to get a whole lot more Thai...

I think because the ceremony was a bit more emotional than most people expected, the party started off quietly, with lots of hugging. I think it was especially moving for the gay couples there, as this was still a very novel event, Vermont being the first state in the US that allowed gay marriages (well, technically civil unions, but I like to remember it as a wedding and ignore the legalese). But the liquor from Ari's wine cellar flowed liberally and everybody got very jolly very quickly.

And, finally, the main event. I don't remember much except that I cried throughout most of the ceremony, and wedding crying being contagious, most of the guests did too. Our minister was a former Catholic priest, who went to Central America to minister to various rebel groups, then fell in love with a nun, left the church and is now a Unitarian minister. With that kind of background, the religious part of the ceremony was mercifully short. We finished with a popular Bangkok song by Lighthouse Family, and then the drinking began.

An hour before the ceremony, the little inn was abuzz with activity. The florists were running around like maniacs up until about twelve seconds before the ceremony began. Meanwhile, Somchai was in deep concentration trying to memorize his vows and I was going over the service with the octagenarian minister. As you can see from the photo with Somchai and the singer for the ceremony, the weather was looking ominous just before we were supposed to start, but just like yesterday, everything cleared up just in time.

Saturday was the wedding day, and we spent most of it nursing hangovers with our friends. I made a huge mistake in going to a local "spa" and getting my hair cut, which any idiot knows is a terrrible idea on your wedding day. Anyway, it looked terrible, but since my disappearing hair always looks terrrible, I think it only bothered me all day and went unnoticed by everyone else. After we donned our tuxedos, we did a few (actually very many) formal photos, a few of which are here. While I am of course a big fan of gay marriages, I will say that a bride comes in handy for wedding photos, since there's only so much you can do with two guys in tuxes.

The dinner was held on the SS Ticonderoga, but was catered by the very friendly folks at the Round Barn. We almost had a catastrophe on our hands, as the weather turned foul, with predicted thunderstorms, gusty winds and hail. The Round Barn owners came over to talk to us as we were about to leave for the dinner to tell us they thought we should cancel due to the weather, which was making the whole event potentially unsafe. We decided to persevere, on the understanding that we may have to drive right back to Warren if the weather continued to deteriorate. It looked pretty grim during the trip, but just as we arrived the clouds parted and we got a great, sunny day. Had a great party, with some speeches, including a surprisingly entertaining one from pomme, who to my surprise had grown from my baby sister to a mature adult (with boobs even!) while I was traveling the world. After lots of drinking, we all headed back to the hotel for continued merriment at the Pitcher Inn bar.

As we bid farewell to Amber, we moved on to the official opening of the wedding weekend, the rehearsal dinner (sans rehearsal of course). And this brings up a slight logistical problem for me, as we have roughly 47,000 photos and twelve hours of video of the wedding weekend, which I think may slow down the progress of the blog a bit. And since this is really supposed to be a travel blog, we should move through this part of our travels briskly to make room for the many subsequent trips. So I've devised an easy way to decide which of the 47,000 photos get to make it into the blog, using the laziness test. Whichever photos are easiest for me to locate, preferably already digitized so I don't have to scan, I will use.

I realize none of this is very romantic, but as you'll see from my waterworks on the wedding day itself, it was of course the most special time of our lives, and we are eternally grateful to the friends and family who schlepped all the way to the middle of nowhere to share this with us.