It’s Just A Life.13

13. The Honeymoon’s Over

Sometime throughout the evening, people started stuffing money in my pockets. 20’s, 50’s, hundred dollars bills. It was quite a shock to say the least. Laurie and I had been married for about 5 or 6 hours at this point; I’m sure it must have started towards the end of our wedding reception. I suppose my mother, or possibly my father, must have told everyone about our honeymoon plans. They weren’t very grand. I had gotten two weeks off from work, as had Laurie, and we were borrowing my father’s motorhome to drive up highway 5 as far as we could. Since we were dirt poor at the time, we didn’t expect that to be very far at all.

We had a few hundred dollars saved, and I think our plan was basically to get to the border of California and Oregon, and then turn around and head back when we were low enough on cash that we had to worry about gas. Instead, our family and friends managed to shower us with somewhere around $1000 I believe.

Incidentally, I think money dances are actually pretty tacky. Not that we weren’t extremely grateful, but check your wedding etiquette books and you’ll see, it’s just considered one of those things that shouldn’t happen. Whatever, we figured we had enough money to make it to Vancouver Island and back now! $1000 was a small fortune to us. Sure, we had a nice sized formal wedding, but the only reason that happened was because when Laurie and I started outlining our plans for the small wedding in the backyard of our rented house in Woodland, her mother said no. “No. I’ve been planning her wedding since practically the day she was born.” So we let her go to town.

I literally have no idea how much the wedding cost. Whereas Laurie planned to make her wedding dress, her mother paid for a formal gown. I was going to make the wedding cake and buy a decent suit. Laurie’s mother hired a caterer, and we rented tuxes for myself and the “best man of honor” (Laurie’s brother filled both rolls), and whereas we planned to have about 20 or 30 people, we had around a hundred, including many of Laurie’s relatives from England and Canada. We did have veto power. There was no way we were riding in a horse drawn carriage down main street in Benicia for instance, and we did decide on cake flavor, venue, wedding colors, and a few other details. But overall when she volunteered, we were quite happy to let her take over.

The wedding was nice, though certainly not lavish. As I said, around a hundred people in my sister’s front yard, and a formal sit down reception at a local community center set in a very nice park. The honeymoon, however, was supposedly up to us.

Since we ended up with a good amount of money in the end, we decided on a meandering path through backroads instead of just shooting up 5 and back down in a day or two. The wedding was August 31, which meant that heading north we had some pretty decent weather, and even though it happened to be Memorial Day weekend, since we were leaving Monday morning, the campgrounds were not incredibly crowded.

We headed out bright and early in the morning the day after the wedding, and decided to stop for provisions on the way out of town. Our first planned stop was Lake Almanor where we spent our first night. I don’t remember anything very interesting there, though it’s a beautiful place to camp, but unfortunately I do remember that there was a problem with the radiator that we discovered the next morning. A leak, shit, we were practically in the middle of nowhere, and we were going to have to head back into Quincy to find a mechanic to fix, and later we discovered actually replace, the radiator.

Talk about nerve wracking. The drive back down to Quincy was pretty stressful. We had to keep a close watch on the temp gauge, and stop as often as possible to fill the leaking radiator. My father had given us his credit card for just such an emergency, but blowing a head gasket would have ended the trip no matter what we could afford. We made it into Quincy just as the engine was reaching a critical point, but we did make it. Yay, we got to spend most of our first day in a mechanics yard, surrounded by absolutely nothing, in 90 degree heat, waiting for the radiator to arrive. Luckily the part didn’t have far to come, and we were back on the road by mid-afternoon.

We headed towards Westwood (the lumber town above Almanor, not the Southern California town), and stopped for a bit to visit my grandmother’s grave in a beautiful old pioneer graveyard in a lightly forested patch of road in between the small hamlet of Chester and Westwood. Then we headed on up towards Burney Falls, and on to Lava Beds National Monument. I have to admit we were a bit overly confident in our time, and gas milage. I don’t know why we didn’t stop sooner, or at least at a gas station. However, we arrived at Lava Beds just after sundown, which considering the time of year means we arrived pretty darn late, and not only were we not sure where we were going to camp for the night, we weren’t even sure we would make it before reaching empty.

Lava Beds is a fascinating place. Barren as a moonscape, with vast empty planes, dozens of fascinating caves, and lots and lots of lava rock of various sorts. It is also very, very dark at night. And contrary to what we were hoping, there are absolutely no services of any kind inside the park other than ranger stations and some basic campgrounds. At least there weren’t 26 years ago. So we were becoming desperate to at least find someplace to park for the night. Laurie was driving, and the two of us were watching the road very carefully for the campground we were supposedly nearing. While my attention was on both the map, and the dark edges of the road looking for the turnoff that we were sure we should be seeing any second, Laurie let out a high pitched yelp and slammed on the brakes! My first indication that we were suddenly coming to a complete stop was the cooking pot that was in the sink directly behind me SLAMMING into the back of my chair. Right. Behind. My head. We both sat stunned for about 10 seconds, and after the shock wore off we laughed, and I said, ” You know it doesn’t do any good to kill me after 2 days of marriage, we don’t even have any life insurance.” The trip went on, but I guess the honeymoon was over.