Off to a good start
Trip Start
Aug 21, 2007
1
27
Trip End
Dec 20, 2007
Bergisch Gladbach,
Germany
Friday, August 24, 2007
This is primarily a travellog to outline our, Regine and Peter's, honeymoon in Southeast Asia and the Far East. To do this properly it's worth starting with our wedding.
We got married twice. That's how you do it in Germany: If you want a church wedding, which was very important to us, you need to have a civil (official) ceremony first. We had the latter on 6th August on Veste Otzberg, a lofty stronghold in the Odenwald region of Germany near Gross-Umstadt, Regine's hometown. This is pretty close to Frankfurt. My sister Ati, her husband Luke and my 2yr old niece came over from the US of A. We were joined by the rest of our families and my best man, Sebi as well as Regine's maid of honour, Karen. We had a great and relaxed time before the last bit of organising the "big wedding" five days later were due.
The church ceremony was an absolute dream. The minister, Pfarrer Dehmel, was outstanding and created a truly special and personal athmosphere. This was underlined by plenty of music. Tilman and 3 friends played "the" Wedding March and an intermezzo as a string quartett. Bine (voice), Sebi (ukulele) and Sascha (guitar) gave a rendition of a beautiful German love song. The organist and Sebi and Sascha played the songs we chose with zest and inspiration and everybody sang along at the top of their voices. Very unlike the usual mumble along at ,say, Christmas.
We then had a chocolate fountain reception at the church hall before we went to Altenberg for pictures and then met friends and family at the "Hiotel zur Post" in odenthal. The party there was phenomenal and the food exquisite. We hardly had time to talk to our guests as we were so engulfed in the games people had conjured up for us and enjoyed all our musician friends perform. The party lasted well into the night, but we still managed a walk through the local area with some of our guests in the morning. What a great celebration. we'd love to do it all again!!!!
The wedding came at the end of 2 years of hard work on our degrees (Regine 2, me 1 3/4 degrees). Regine finished her studies, I finished my General Practice training and we had no job to go to to start off with. That prompted us to say we'd like to take time off until Christmas to travel. After all that is our favourite joint passion and what got us together in New Zealand in 2003. So here we are at the start of that grand trip of four months... let's see what happens!
