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.

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.

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.

The SS Ticonderoga was an old steamship that used to ply the waters of nearby Lake Champlain. When it retired it was moved to the Shelburne Museum's grounds, where it is stranded incongruously on the lawn. It also serves as an events venue, including the very important Brian and Somchai Rehearsal Dinner.

We then drove up an hour to the Shelburne Museum, where we were having our rehearsal dinner in just a few hours. Again, not much to see in terms of party preparation, but we explored the museum for a while. The Shelburne probably has the best collection of Americana in the country, housed in a sprawling outdoor museum. About sixty historical buildings from around New England were moved to the museum, and then many of the buildings were used to house the collection.

There were a handful of guests already arrived in Warren when we arrived on Thursday, although the official festivities didn't kick off until Friday. So we rounded everyone up and drove one town over to the restaurant there. When we pulled in there was a biker gang having their monthly get-together in the bar, which was a bit daunting for a bunch of queers and/or Asians. But this being Vermont, everyone was very cool. We went upstairs to a very casual, very American restaurant and had a fun time.

We also had to rent a few more inns in the area to accomodate the guests, since each one was quite small. The other main hotel guests stayed at was the Inn at the Round Barn, pictured here. It's just outside Warren, set in beautiful grounds. They've got an excellent catering group there, who we also used to cater our rehearsal dinner on Friday evening. We put about twenty guests there, and they loved it. We stopped by a couple of times, and every time we found our guests cooking with the owners or the caterers in the kitchen, sharing recipes. I was a bit nervous about a bunch of Thais invading a tiny Vermont town for a gay wedding initially, but everyone was really friendly. By the time our wedding party rolled around Saturday night, we had some of the townspeople at the party, including some of the Round Barn staff.

While the public areas and exterior of the inn are typical New England, the thirteen rooms are quite idiosyncratic. Each was designed by a local artist or design team, and very thematic. We stayed at the ski room, which, obviously, uses skiing as the theme. The overall effect is of a ski lodge, with all sorts of skiing kitsch spread around the room. Other rooms are completely different, and are either fun and frivolous, or too over the top, depending on your personal tastes.

Pitcher Inn, Overall: 8, (Room: 8, Facilities: 6, Service: 10)

The Pitcher Inn is a very typical New England inn on the outside, with the added attraction of an excellent chef and one of the best wine cellars anywhere, earning it a very rare affiliation with Relais and Chateaux. Ari ran the wine cellar at the time (I saw from their website that he's now the general manager) and he's extremely knowledgeable and a really great guy as well. The chef is a very nice woman who's also extremely shy, so she rarely leaves the kitchen, but she's really amazing. We were aiming for an intimate weekend of topnotch food and drink, so these elements were very important, and they really delivered. As an aside, when I'm planning a trip I often consult places like tripadvisor.com, which gives everyone the opportunity to comment on a place. I find it fun more than informative, since invariably, one person will write, greatest hotel on the planet, followed by the next commentator saying never again, disaster, etc. But one piece of advice if you're reading other people's comments, if the person starts by saying "I had my wedding at the hotel" then disregard the rest of the comment. Invariably the person says it's the best place on earth, service is the best etc. But of course when you're paying enormous sums of money, renting out the whole hotel and all that you're going to get great service, plus it's where you had your wedding so you're emotionally attached to the place. Having said all this, in this particular case, disregard the advisory, and believe me, this really is a fantastic little inn.

Warren is a very small, very quaint town in the Mad River Valley in central Vermont. It's very popular in winter for skiing and fall for looking at the leaves changing color, much more laid back in the summer. Warren has a town hall, two churches, one covered bridge, one general store, and the Pitcher Inn, plus a few houses of course. And that's all you need to make a typical New England village.

91. Warren, Vermont

It was strange driving into Warren, home of our three day wedding. I had been working on it with a local wedding planner for many months, but only via internet, so I really had no idea what to expect. But Somchai was even more clueless, since he's never been to small town New England. As we were driving up the narrow mountain roads, past farm after farm, I could see Somchai getting very tense in the passenger seat. I don't think he had expected the place to be quite this rural, and worried that the hotel and wedding places wouldn't be up to scratch, and that our guests, flying in from all over the world, would be bored out of their minds in countryside like this. But as we pulled into the little town of Warren and arrived at our hotel, the Pitcher Inn, he seemed much more at ease.