Wedding Planning Moment of the Day

Sometimes even the best-laid plans go awry. B and I have been planning for this weekend for about a month now. We're taking his parents to see Florence for the first time so that they can a) see the area and b) visit a few rehearsal dinner sites. We made schedules, appointments, and dinner plans. We're visiting the hotels and having dinner at the location of the wedding reception, but I hadn't anticipated the extra dose of culture they'll get. You see, this weekend is the Trail of Tears Commemorative Motorcycle Ride.

What is that, you ask? Why, I'll tell you. It's a day when 90,000+ Harley riders (that's roughly three times the population of Florence) gather to remember the Trail of Tears, riding on their hogs from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Florence, Alabama, where they gather to, um, toast the conclusion of the ride. In a park. Right across from one of the rehearsal dinner sites.

Before you brush this one off, let me remind you that Florence is a small town with limited roadways, so to help the bikers move more smoothly through town (and, thereby, out of town), Florence shuts down the entire right-hand lane of the highway, meaning that you can basically only make right hand turns going east-bound. If you need to go west, you better be sporting some leather chaps.

I know this is confusing. You must be wondering why the trail ends in Florence, if the Native Americas actually ended up in Oklahoma, well never fear-- there's a website that can give you all the information, including a warning for those who have a hotel reservation at the Airport Inn across from the Thunder Creek Harley location--"that hotel burned and will not be open at the time of the ride."

I got wind of this scheduling overlap a few days ago when my dad called to warn me, but decided that we'd already made the appointments and there was no sense in changing weekends. That said, I had to hide it (even from the blog) until today for fear that B's mom would hear about it and panic, which, to be honest, would be a reasonable reaction. Did I mention that a friend melted her engine block one particularly sweltering Trail day when she got stuck at a traffic light for four hours waiting for the bikers to pass?

Needing to vent to someone, I called K, my sister, and asked her what the most unreasonable thing was that might also be going on in Florence this weekend.

"Ohhh," she said. "Trail of Tears."

"It'll be ok, though," I said. "They're suppose to ride through between 12 and 1:30, and our appointment isn't until 2."

"Right," she said. "Because bikers are always known for their punctuality and attention to schedule."

She's been down-graded from Matron of Honor to Flower Girl.

So pray for us, dear readers, that we don't totally ensnared in the mayhem that is Trail of Tears 2008. And for those poor girls who have a wedding planned for Saturday. Eeek!