How Not To Get Ready for A Wedding in Barcelona, or Anywhere else

The first thing we discover when we arrive around three in the afternoon in a warm and sunny Barcelona is that I have the times wrong for the wedding. I thought we were to leave for the wedding at 6:00, but a cell phone call from Allison informs us that we need to be on the bus at 4:30 and the wedding starts at 6. We are way behind, and we still have to fix Scott’s suit. We miss the parking garage we are supposed to use and have to drive around the maze of one way streets to get back to it. This whole endeavor, plus parking and dragging our luggage to the hotel, shave off about thirty minutes of our precious time. We check into the hotel, which looks like it was designed top-to-bottom by Ikea: extremely small, with all of the vertical spaces used; the floors are painted concrete, the walls are white and green. What happens next is a lesson in how you don’t want to go about getting ready for a wedding. I had called Primus and Stacy before they left for Spain and asked them to bring some clothes for Scott, but we were thinking we could use the suit bought at Hugo Boss, by pinning the pants legs to the right length (the jacket, we thought, fit okay). Unfortunately, we have no safety pins and no time to find any. Jeff graciously pitches in by going room to room through the hotel, seeking pins. He finds a total of one, so Scott ends up trying to pin the pants using buttons bearing the hotel’s logo (like campaign buttons) that he took from a jar at the registration desk. I shower and pull on my dress, throwing make-up, hair brush and everything I might need into a bag to take on the bus. I then take over the tailoring duties and Scott, already frazzled, heads to the shower. He turns on the sink to brush his teeth, but then decides to hop in the shower first, leaving the sink running. Normally not a problem, except the water pressure is massive and the sink doesn’t drain. Within seconds, water is pouring onto the floor by the gallon, which Scott discovers because the water from the sink starts to flow into the walk-in shower. No time to deal with that problem, so we just throw some towels in the general direction of the newly-formed lake and hope that the people in the room below us have a sense of humor. I have pinned the legs of Scott’s suit, but for some reason they have come out too short and are now highwaters (fitting, given the flood in our bathroom). Meanwhile, the shirt that came with our friends is wrinkled and his shoes are the brown boots that have been worn the entire trip though rain and mud and we have no implement with which to shine them. And the jacket that we thought fit, really doesn’t: the sleeves are a good three inches too long. At some point we pull it together, as best we can, and make it to the bus. Sadly, our beautiful stress-free morning is a memory long gone and we are feeling seriously stressed. However, the bus ride is beautiful and uneventful, I ask around and get some missing make-up, Allison remarks that I look very nice for a 20 minute pull-together, and no one seems to notice Scott’s sartorial challenges. With all that, we are able to relax.