Our Wedding

Stephen and I were married in a small ceremony in our backyard at 1PM on Saturday, June 15, 2002. The festivities actually began Friday night, when we had a birthday party for Stephen’s youngest sister, who was turning 40. Stephen’s half-sister from the UK and his half-brother and his wife joined us for barbecued chicken, potato salad, corn on the cob, and of course, cake and ice cream. We built a fire in the firepit and chatted until rather late.

The morning of the wedding things got rolling early. One of my housemates supervised the others and any available volunteers in decorating the backyard, where the ceremony was to be held. I didn’t know what she had in mind, but just let her go to it and it turned out wonderfully. Stephen’s other sister arrived from Radium Hot Springs late that morning. Then I started getting ready around 11AM. I had had Barbie (of Barbie’s Shop—see link on home page) make my dress for me based on one she had made me years earlier in blue velvet. I just took her the material (an off-white peau-de-soie from Ant Hill Fabrics) and asked her to make one like it but with a lower neckline. It was cut just above the knee, with ties at the back to give it a more form-fitting shape. I had my friend Ty Morgan, a well-known makeup artist, do my makeup. Shortly after he arrived around 11:30AM Lynne, a photographer friend who was going to be his ride to another wedding, arrived, and she took some photos of me getting done up. Ty also touched up my hair and attached the veil. To accompany the dress I wore the veil, headdress and earrings my mother had worn when she married my dad in 1956. The final touch to the outfit was the shoes. I had been unable to get white shoes in my size (13 wide), so Stephen went to Canadian Tire (a hardware chain) and got a can of white vinyl upholstery paint. Several coats on an old pair of black shoes I no longer wore and voila: white shoes in 13W! (As I told people later, these shoes now have sentimental value, so “you can do anything but lay offa my new sprayed shoes!”)

Reverend Nadene from my church arrived around 12:30PM and we went over the last details of the ceremony. Finally it was show time!

We got started just after the scheduled 1PM time. The plan was that everyone would be seated in two banks of six or seven chairs in the backyard, with Stephen and Rev. Nadene under the arch formed by two trees. I would come around the house from the front, walk up the aisle between the two banks of chairs and join them under the trees, with Diana Kroll’s version of “The Look of Love” playing. Well, I made my entrance into the backyard and just before I was to turn off the sidewalk onto the grass I realized I had left my bouquet inside! I made a quick apology, which apparently no one heard, disappeared into the house, and then re-emerged into the backyard from the gate in the picture above.

Fortunately that was the only glitch in the proceedings. When I arrived at the appointed spot, Stephen flipped up my veil. Rev. Nadene performed a lovely ceremony and I was fighting back tears. I was doing pretty well, except that when I cry my nose runs and I didn’t have any tissues with me. Things were also a bit of a blur—I chose not to wear my glasses, without which I am extremely near-sighted. The housemate who had coordinated the decorations was best woman and one of Stephen’s childhood friends was best man. Before I knew it we were married and were over at the patio table signing the registration documents and posing for pictures. In the one below you can get a better view of the veil, headdress and earrings mentioned above.

I had baked and decorated the wedding cake (a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting) the day before. The topper was a paper flower arrangement Stephen’s grandmother had made for his parents’ wedding in 1952. It’s in the upper left of the photo of the cake below.

Of course we also had to do some gag photos with Stephen’s 1956 Messerschmitt KR200.

I even managed to get in. Normally the passenger’s legs straddle the driver, but in the dress this side-saddle posture worked better.

After the pictures we changed back into more comfortable summer attire and sat around with everyone and chatted, opened some gifts and cards from the UK, and just relaxed. A couple of hours later it started to cloud over, get windy and eventually spit rain. In a way it was beautiful because the wind caused a lot of blossoms from the trees to shed their petals, so it seemed like it was snowing white flower petals! We moved inside and had an early dinner—barbecued strip loin steaks, baked potatoes, salad and the aforementioned carrot cake with ice cream.

Sunday morning I made a big breakfast for the family with English bangers and other sausages from Spolumbo’s, a locally famous specialty sausage shop. My housemates reconstructed some of the decorations that had suffered during the previous day’s brief shower. I went over to Co-op (a nearby supermarket) to pick up the cake I had ordered for the potluck reception (my oven won’t handle a cake that large).The cake was supposed to say: “Teri & Stephen: A New Life Together Starts Today”, but the baker had left off the final “s” in “starts”. Fortunately I checked it before leaving and the baker was still around to fix it. Around 3PM guests started arriving. In total we probably had around 75 people including many of Stephen’s sports car friends, old friends of his family from his neighbourhood, and some from my church and workplace.

Here you can see the decorations my housemates set up in the backyard.

We had a brass quintet thanks to my new brother-in-law (who pays the French horn), and if you look carefully at the photo above you can just make out their music stands beneath the trees at the right. The other two members of Stephen’s harmonica trio also showed up and joined him in an impromptu performance. Stephen was playing the chord harmonica for the most part. The chord harmonica is an accompaniment instrument that is about two feet long and looks like two really long harmonicas hinged together. During one interlude I went up to him, put my arm around him and told the crowd that when I saw what a big, shiny instrument he had, I just had to have him! The crowd roared, of course. The next photo shows me at the back door making one of my periodic appearances to do announcements or crack jokes.

I also started a new bridal tradition: car-lifting. Forget the bouquet and garter-tossing. One of Stephen’s friends had seen me lift a corner of the Messerschmitt at a car show so Stephen could polish the tire, and he had me reprise this feat to the delight of our guests (actually it’s not much of a feat—it weighs about as much as a snowmobile, and the weight is all in the back where the engine is).

We were originally supposed to leave for our honeymoon the next day, but we ended up delaying our departure until Sunday, June 23 (my birthday). Stephen had to attend an amateur night with some of his harmonica students and he also needed time to work on getting the premises ready for a new business (restoring vintage British and other sports cars). As it turned out, we actually spent the first day after the reception installing a new hot water heater in his family house (how romantic!)

We finally left around 2PM on Sunday, June 23 for our honeymoon, three nights of camping in the mountains. Our plan was to camp at Lake Louise the first night, but when we arrived there they told us they were not accepting tents or soft-sided trailers due to bear sightings. They recommended we proceed north to the rather inauspiciously named Mosquito Creek campground. We had a quick bite to eat at Lake Louise and then headed north after fending off a lady who thought we were there to provide her with road service (We were traveling in Stephen’s 1971 Land Rover which has been painted to look like an Automobile Association of Great Britain road service vehicle of that period). Fortunately the campground’s name did not reflect any unusual abundance of flying pests. We pitched the tent, made a fire (actually more smoke than fire), and sat around talking until it started to rain. We dove into the tent and quickly fell asleep (that bit of rain was really the only we experienced during the whole trip). Stephen’s back bothered him that night due to the hardness of the surface we were sleeping on, but in subsequent nights we rearranged things to make it more comfortable for him. My main concern was running to the outhouse in the middle of the night when you know there might be a bear in between!

The next morning we continued along the icefield parkway towards Jasper. We stopped at the Crowfoot Glacier lookout point, and to my surprise when I panned my camera to the left to get a better view of the mountain I realized that I was the only one looking at the mountain—everyone else was fixed on the black bear that was grazing about 50 feet below me! I was a bit shaken up, but realized it was unlikely to charge up a very steep slope into a crowd of a hundred people, so I got my zoom lens out and took this picture. We actually saw an amazing amount of wildlife during the trip: seven or eight bears, a mountain goat, and more deer, elk and bighorn sheep than one could count (not to mention these unusual large grey birds called Clark’s nuthatches). Hint for spotting wildlife: look for cars stopped at the side of the road.

Our next stop was Peyto Lake (pronounced Pee-toh). Besides being very beautiful, it had a lot of memories for Stephen. His grandmother had come over from England and was so impressed with its beauty that she painted a picture which hung in their living room for many years. In this photo we obscure most of the lake as I show off my “windblown look” ( a few hundred miles in an ancient Land Rover with the windows open will do that to a gal).

A little further along, at the Mount Athabasca lookout, we noticed a guy waving at us and taking our picture. It turned out he had a fondness for Land Rovers after bouncing through Peru in one 20 years ago while doing a film on development. We chatted with him and his wife for a while (they were from San Diego) and then headed onwards.

One of the main reasons we went to Jasper was that I had never seen the Columbia Icefields. We stopped at the Icefield Centre, just over the border between Banff National Park to the south and Jasper National Park to the north. We bought tickets for one of the icefield coaches, which are huge six-wheel drive vehicles that can handle the 32% grade on the gravel road to the glacier. One of the interesting things we noticed is that once one gets to Japser, there are more foreign than local tourists (Banff has more local day-trippers since it is just an hour from Calgary). For example, most of the people on the snow-coach with us were from France, and everywhere there were loads of Brits, Germans and Italians, with a fair number of Japanese and Koreans, too.

We arrived at the Whistlers campsite just outside Jasper in the late afternoon, and after claiming our campsite we went into the town for dinner.

The next day (Tuesday), we went to Maligne (pronounced Mah-leen) Canyon and then Maligne Lake, where we did a short hike. Then it was off to Maligne Hot Springs, where we grabbed a burger and then had a soak in the hottest hot springs in the Rockies. Actually it was just right for me (I love soaking in really hot water and find most “hot” springs or hot tubs not nearly hot enough). We were only in the water a couple of minutes when the couple from San Diego we had met at Mount Athabasca found us! We spent a lot of time chatting with them and then joined them for dessert at a nearby restaurant after a brief walk up the hill to inspect the ruins of the old hot spring site (which Stephen had visited with his family many years ago).

Wednesday morning it was time to return home. We picked up some gear oil, ice and other necessities in Jasper, then set out southbound. Our plan was to go south to Saskatchewan Crossing, and then cut across eastwards, gas up at a small hamlet called Nordegg and then head south on the gravel forestry road (Stephen wanted to try out the Land Rover and retrace a route he had taken with his family).

We stopped at a small campground called “Two O’Clock Creek” and had a picnic lunch, then continued to Nordegg—where we ran into two members of Illusions, the transgender group in Calgary! We had just seen them when we attended the Illusions Birthday party the night before we left Calgary for the honeymoon, so it was a bit of a shock to run into them in such a remote and tiny settlement. Of course, there were the usual “small world” comments.

The gravel road turned out to be more than Stephen had bargained for: animals bounding out onto the road (including yet another bear), logging trucks that occupied the whole road and seemed blissfully unaware of the possibility someone else might be coming the other way, huge dust clouds and back-breaking washboard. We ended up cutting back across to a paved highway about halfway home. We stopped in Cochrane and ended our honeymoon with a nice meal on the patio at the aptly named Omega Restaurant.

We returned home around 10:30PM, ready to start our next big adventure: married life!

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Page created June 29, 2002. Last updated: April 23, 2001.