Usually when I go to North Carolina I'm going to the mountains in the far west and drive through the Shenandoah Valley; I hadn't taken this route to central  North Carolina  for a long time. And I wasn't looking forward to the drive, particularly the 100 mile section of I-95 between Alexandria and Richmond. That section is  normally jammed, loaded with trucks, hectic and pressured and you feel like you're driving through a 100 mile tunnel. It makes driving the New Jersey Turnpike look inviting.

But surprisingly on a work day on the way down there were few trucks and, actually, light traffic.  After Petersburg you switch to I-85 to go southwest to Durham and North Carolina. I had forgotten how hilly, not mountainous, it was going up to the Piedmont from the coast. This road was also relatively empty of traffic and the only unpleasant thing was the condition of the  pavement after crossing into North Carolina. 

I had one set of directions to reach the hotel from Henry; on the phone the staff at the hotel said they were bad directions and to use the ones they gave me; the people at the NC welcome tourist area said the directions the hotel had given me were bad and to use the directions to the hotel they were giving me. After winding up in various residential areas of Durham and talking to several retired residents to get directions and missing the driveway into the hotel twice, I got into my room in the middle of the afternoon.

The area is called the North Carolina Triangle or Research Triangle, with three medium-sized cities: Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill,  many small towns and a lot of suburban sprawl area, The whole "Triangle" section is maybe 30 miles by 30 miles. 

Just as most of the wedding guests from other parts of the country, I was staying at the Holiday Inn Raleigh Durham Airport Hotel  in the southern part of Durham on the edge of the Triangle Research Park which must be several miles long and a mile wide. The hotel was really a modern motel but was nicely designed and looked from the outside like a Southern hotel from the late 19th Century. The motel itself was very good but the poor signage for the entrance caused me a lot of annoyance.

The rehearsal banquet was to the west in Hillsborough, a small town, essentially a suburb of Chapel Hill; the wedding itself and the first reception were  in Chapel Hill, the second reception was also in Chapel Hill. On Friday it was very warm; Saturday, the wedding day, was forecast to be in the high 70s. Saturday was, in fact, a beautiful sunny day with the perfect sky and colors for a wedding, although very warm and  humid.

I set out for the rehearsal banquet in Hillsborough around 4:15 on Friday, went a quarter of mile to the Interstate 40 entrance; before I had reached the bottom of the entrance ramp, traffic came to a complete halt; all the lanes on the highway were stopped from rush hour congestion and long term construction. Traffic was stop and go, moving at  5 to 10 mph for about five or six miles and then became normal heavy traffic to the Hillsborough exit.

Hillsborough  looks like a small l country crossroads town and  appears very prosperous; I suspect that the town is bigger than it first appears. I parked at the courthouse and got to the restaurant, the Saratoga Grill, at 4:55; It seemed to be an antiques store and I actually entered twice until I realized that it WAS an antiques store and that the restaurant was upstairs. 

Since it was a few minutes before 5:00,  the restaurant was still closed, I went to a drugstore to buy film and looked a little more closely at the town. The commercial part was about 2 blocks by 2 blocks. Courthouse on a lawn, shade trees, relatively quiet and rather prosperous looking on first glance. The local landmark is the town clock on the court house .  The weather was clear and sunny but warm, approaching hot and edging up in humidity.

At 5 o'clock  I went back to the Saratoga Grill but no other guests were there yet; I found out later that the rehearsal had run longer than expected. The restaurant's look is very reminiscent of the Laurel Brigade Inn in Leesburg: not because it was exactly the same but because it felt the same.  Although Hillsborough like Leesburg dates from the middle 1700s, unlike the Laurel Brigade, the Saratoga Grill  isn't an original 17th Century farm house with genuine[?] 18th and 19th century furnishings; it's a 20th century commercial building. But the lighting, the window design, the table cloths, the table settings, the decorations on the walls made it feel very similar.

The tables were covered with table cloths with different colored designs and had attractive flower arrangements and candles on them. The floors were wide wooden planked. The walls  had pleasant paintings and decorations that made the room feel warm and comfortable but not cluttered. And the light from the front windows, which lasted almost as long as we were in the restaurant, played off the wood and the fabrics and made everything seem especially bright and cheerful. [Click picture to see full size.]

After a while I got restless and went into the bar to wait and was dropped into the middle of a conversation. There were four semi-local women there and the bartender. The women seemed to be in Hillsborough to get in line for spaces at a crafts show that was coming up. The bartender had a southern accent; at least until one of the women asked him "And when did you move to the South, since of course you're not from here"; he was, in fact, from Sioux Falls, South Dakota [all these out-landers sound alike] and had gotten to North Carolina "through three jobs and two marriages".

The women asked him whether Hillsborough was a "safe" place in regard to crime. Considering the town has only 8,000 or 10,000 people I thought it was an odd question. However, the bartender's answer was even odder: He said the town looked very peaceable but that it had it's normal quota of murders, beatings and drug dealings. Perhaps the women were putting on a sophisticated front, but none of them seemed to think this was unusual. He also went into details on the previous chief of police's sexual adventures in the cop cars. On a touristy note, he said that this restaurant - the one he was working in - was the best in town. That another one [Tupelo's Restaurant ] was very good but not equal to this one and that of the two Mexican restaurants you went to Bandido's Mexican Cafe to drink and to Casa Ibarra to eat.

When the bartender was talking to me, I realized how taken he was with Andrew's and Laura's selection of red house wine, an Eger Bull's Blood which they had brought in and which he had never heard of before. [He admitted he had sampled it so maybe there's grounds for a civil suit about the bill.] In fact, he mentioned two or three times how good the Bull's Blood was.

I was getting restless because it was getting late and did hear some people coming in; it was Andrew's Aunt Zsuzsanna and Uncle Tom who had left the Boston area that morning and had just arrived in Hillsborough. Then in a few minutes the whole wedding party and everyone else arrived.

I'm guessing there were about 50 to 70 guests at the sit down banquet, mostly at tables of 5 or 6. At the table next to mine were Stephen, Thomas, with their friends Laura and Jessica, Henry's nieces with their husbands and Henry's uncle. At my table were Henry, Mrs. Stern, Henry's sister Dotty and Father Ronald Murphy. He had been one of Andrew and Laura's literature professors at Georgetown with whom they had developed a relationship outside school. He was giving the sermon at the wedding and was a type of co-celebrant.

He was telling some stories about growing up at the shore during the beginning of WW2 when the German submarines were decimating the merchant marine. He mentioned one instance of standing with his father on the shore, maybe Point Pleasant??, and seeing the sky all red and yellow over the ocean. He said to his father what a beautiful sunset it was. His father corrected him, saying the sun set in the west and when you're on the shore you're looking eastwards. That it wasn't a sunset but ships burning and people dying.

Fr. Murphy also made a comment that surprised me a great deal. He talked about the blimps going out from Lakehurst to attack the submarines. Firstly, I was surprised that the blimps were attacking the submarines, since I had thought that the blimps were used for reconnaissance and for targeting, not for battle. I was, however, even more surprised at  his comment that in some of the battles between the blimps and the submarines, the submarines destroyed the blimps!

The meal was large, well served, well presented and delicious. There was a voluminous and varied salad and for the entree a choice of grilled salmon, vegetarian angel hair, chicken cordon bleu and steak.  One of the side dishes was  potatoes whipped with pieces of corn but I've forgotten the others. One of the desserts was a chocolate cake, another a cherry[?] cheese cake and a third one I've forgotten; the wines were both Hungarian.

The dinner ended around 8 pm and it was a short, maybe 15 mile, but difficult drive through construction, lane changes, and traffic coming to a dead halt two times, back to the motel where I got lost the second time trying to find the entrance. I spent a little time with Mrs. Stern who had the room next to mine and with Henry who had a room across the hall.

Saturday morning I went out to a mall about 2 miles away on the interstate highway - and got lost getting into it - to pick up a wedding card, since I had left mine at home; also got some early Christmas cards; got lost the third time entering the motel.

I had borrowed a lap top computer from a co-worker, because the hotel didn't have a way to access the web and e-mail. I had already set the laptop up for the dial in service I'd have to use in North Carolina. It was very slow, around a 20k connection, but fast enough to delete the junk mail from my mail box and to see that there was no important real mail that had to be answered.

I set off for the wedding and arrived at around 1:30 after only a few construction delays. Orange United Methodist Church is a very small church set off the road with a graveyard on the side and looking very country-ish and simple.

I was at first surprised that Mrs. Stern and Krystina and Henry were in the back of the church but that was because their processional to their real seats in the front pews was the opening of the ceremony. Andrew and Laura were fortunate that they have five surviving grandparents who were at their wedding; near the altar there were three floral displays for the grandparents who were no longer alive.

[I didn't want to take pictures during the wedding service and also later didn't take any of the bridal couple  because I didn't want to get into the way of the professional photographers who were doing the formal wedding pictures of Laura in her gown and Andrew. So except for the one of the groom and best men, the various pictures you see here and on the album page are informal ones.]

There were two best men, Stephen and Thomas, but their picture was as a zoom shot from the back of the church just before the wedding started and they look fuzzy. [I was wondering what one of the blurs was in that fuzzy picture of Andrew and learned later that it was a lapel badge of the NY Mets in honor of his paternal grandfather].

The wedding ceremony was one designed by Laura and Andrew in conjunction with each of their cultures and traditions. What was more noteworthy than any individual part of the ceremony was the ceremony as a whole: it wasn't traditional and it wasn't trendy and it wasn't different for the sake of novelty and it wasn't trying to be something. It just was. What I had noticed on several occasions on the weekend was that Andrew and Laura were vibrant and mature. It's very easy to have enthusiasm and excitement and energy when you're young; and it's very easy to have maturity and reason when you're old. But they seem to have the youthful traits of energy and vibrancy but with the maturity and gravitas that most people don't gain until they are much older. And the ceremony - which I suspect but don't know for sure - that they designed themselves reflected that. There was tradition, both secular and religious, but it was living and vibrant.

The Old Testament readings were in English and Hungarian, the New Testament ones in English and German [and Henry had perfect, beautiful,  vowels, diphthongs and consonants]. The night before the priest had promised that he would have a short sermon and it was fairly short but with an interesting topic, Andrew's and Laura's wedding as a manifestation or epiphany of God's love. [All the details of the ceremony are in the image to the upper left].

I actually didn't see Laura's jewels until later, the church was crowded with a lot of heads, but her necklace, earrings and bracelet were - to my eye - all the same or at least perfectly matched to each other: tiny pearls. Later I learned that they actually were both from tradition, a great aunt who had died young about a half century ago, and from now, a present Andrew had given her.

The first reception was held immediately after the wedding service in the church hall. There were English-style tea finger sandwiches, punch and a special wedding cake. Instead of the usual tiered sheet cake, there was a display table of 15? 20? dozen unusual cupcakes. The taste, especially of the yellow cake ones, was the best I've ever had in a cup cake and it was crowned by a delicious whipped cream? light butter cream? frosting placed in a checkerboard pattern that had another flavor inside the squares. But even the appearance of the cakes was special. Each cupcake was decorated by hand with live flowers, not just the petals but with the center of the flower and sometimes with buds of other flowers. The cakes were then  arranged in levels with an additional bowed arch of more cakes that rose up and cascaded down, referencing an ordinary tiered wedding cake.

During part of the reception I was with Paul McDonald talking with a couple whom I didn't know - and I later realized later Paul didn't know them either. From their conversation it sounded like they might work with Laura's father at Duke University. The wife was saying that as she and her husband  drove up into the church parking lot and passed the side of the grave yard, she had recognized the name on the main tombstone: Nunn - as in Senator Nunn and the Nunn's of North Carolina and Tennessee. It was the name of the  plantation owner where her ancestors had been slaves. She had been doing genealogical research on her family and knew the name and knew that the plantation had been in this general area but still was more than surprised that this was the church the plantation family had gone to. 

She and her husband also told me a story I found some what difficult to believe: the plantation owner's two legitimate children had died young and his only remaining offspring was an illegitimate son by an African slave. After the legitimate children had died, the father offered the plantation to the mulatto son  -  in ante-bellum North Carolina.. For the ante-bellum South that sounded VERY unusual. But supposedly the mulatto son would only agree if he could marry a specific woman who was more African than he; the father objected since that would be heading to darkening instead of to lightening; the son ran away; the father died; the son came back, took over the plantation and married the woman. I also talked briefly to Frank Borchert from Duke, whom I hadn't seen for decades.

At this reception Andrew and Laura had done something I hadn't seen before: they had arranged a table with photographs and mementoes of their life and relationship. Here Thomas' friend  Laura is admiring the display [which can be clicked to see full size]..

You drove about two miles from the church through the main street of Chapel Hill with the stores and frat houses and coeds of the university [someone claimed that the fact that the coeds you passed by on the campus were so good looking was proof positive that UNC was a first rate school: his theory was that beautiful women attract intelligent men and that intelligent men who will be earning a lot of money in the future attract beautiful women. I wasn't convinced by the theory] to the  second wedding reception at the Horace Williams House, an historic home from the middle 1800s surrounded by a park in the center of Chapel Hill. One particularly interesting detail about the house is that one of the ceilings  is parquet wood. 

There was a large awning/canopy set up on the grounds just outside the house with two rows of tables and a serving table between them. The food was a catered barbeque from Bullock's Bar-B-Que which may be the most famous barbeque restaurant in the country. There were two kinds of barbeque, one pork and one said to be chicken but I think it was a different kind of pork; the sauce, which is vinegary instead of smoky, is served separately so you can choose your degree of spice. The meat was tender, juicy and flavorful. There was good cole slaw and good baked beans but outstanding hush puppies: they were light and crisp and had flavor. There were two desserts but one of them, a type of loose banana cream pie, was so good it made me forget the other one. All in all, an outstanding meal. I particularly liked the various types of hard cider that were being offered.

During the meal an acoustic combo was playing mountain / hillbilly music as background. I was talking with Henry's mother, Stephen and his friend Jessica and asked if any of them could explain to me the difference between blue grass and what's called "old time-y" music. Jessica said that, as a matter of fact,  her mother played old time-y music on the fiddle [Stephen noted that his mother played the violin] and that although both were acoustic, old time tended to have a limited and historic repertoire. It sounds like it might be based a lot on British Isles  ballads and Victorian parlor songs, with little new being added to the repertoire. Just as the music we were hearing, it was more for listening than for dancing.

For a wedding day and for pictures the weather was perfect: with bright blue skies and sun; luckily we were indoors during most of the daylight, because it was also very hot and humid. Outdoors at night the temperature dropped, the breeze picked up, and even the insects stayed away -- I suspect that wasn't an accident but that Andrew and Laura had set up torches to drive the insects out.

Not only the he wedding itself but the style of the three receptions also showed Andrew's and Laura's thought and preparation for the various people of various backgrounds coming to their wedding and their own relationship to their guests. I t wasn't until Laura was throwing her bouquet that many of the customs that I'm used to at a wedding came to mind: the first dance, the cutting of the cake, the garter, that I hadn't missed because the two of them had done such well thought out wedding..

After the reception and difficult driving on the interstate, I got back to the motel, having again missed the entrance  on the first try, talked a little to Henry and cleaned out the e-mail. [Congestion: I've mentioned getting lost and transit quite a bit. The hotel is poorly signed and difficult to find  but that can be corrected easily. The area, however,  has about  750,000 people, but spread out over an area maybe 30 by 30 miles. There was long term road construction that caused an immediate problem but the difficulty is really so many people living spread out and having to drive to get anywhere. There are always reports that traffic in the Washington area is terrible and that it's the 2nd or 3rd most congested area of the US. Partly because I know my way around here and partly because of where I've chosen to live, I don't experience traffic congestion too often. But in any case,  two of the three days in the Raleigh Durham Triangle had far worse congestion and traffic problems than what I've ever  experienced in Washington and the Washington suburbs.]

Sunday morning Laura and Andrew had invited everyone to join them for breakfast in the hotel restaurant and most people had a buffet breakfast and then began departing to California and Massachusetts and Nevada and .....

Henry's mother, sister and uncle and nieces had left very early to get back to New Jersey in daylight; I started back around 10am, going up the  Durham Freeway to I-85. I stopped at a supermarket in North Carolina between Henderson and the  Virginia border for some soda. From the interstate you don't notice it but when you're on smaller local roads the area is extremely poor; it's been so long since I've there on smaller roads that I'd forgotten how  economically bad off this section of North Carolina is.

Traffic on Sunday morning and afternoon was light and truck-free to Petersburg; heavier but moving at 79 mph through Fredericksburg; and very heavy but moving steadily at 69 mph to Alexandria that I reached around 2:30. [an hour after I got home I heard on the radio that a series of crashes added to Sunday afternoon traffic had backed 95 up for several miles below the Washington Beltway. Arrived home at 2:30 and began packing and preparing for my convention trip to Richmond a few days later..

Manhattan January 2002	Thomas' Graduation May 2002	Asheville House Sep 2002	Manhattan April 2003	Exchange Place June 2003	Jersey City and Manhattan Trolley Tour  November 2004	Hoboken October 2003		Jersey City and Three Broadway Revivals April 2004
Manhattan December 2001	Manhattan March 2002	Manhattan April 2002	Stephen's Birthday Laura's Graduation May 2003	Wedding Pictures Oct 2002	Jersey City / Manhattan  September 2004	Ashland King's Dominion	Cumberland and Western Maryland RR 2005	Comments? Corrections? Broken Links?

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