No. 13 Where's My Wedding Gown
A Special WTB?! Anniversary Issue: England
Happy 1st Newsletter Anniversary
Newsletter by the Numbers
We have readers in 15 countries:
Help me spread the word to all seven continents!
What’s Ahead for Where’s the Bathroom?!
WTB will continue with a monthly travel humor story for free and paid subscribers.
In the coming year, I’d like to feature some of you! Do you have a travel mishap, adventure gone awry? You know, that story you tell about that time when that thing happened in that place.
That one.
Send it to me and maybe your story will be featured in a future issue.
And now for the main attraction:
Where’s My Wedding Gown?
All this talk of anniversaries puts me in mind of a certain day in the early 2000s, when my family traveled to England to celebrate a different anniversary with me.
It was the occasion of my twentieth wedding anniversary. I met my husband in England while we were both studying abroad at the University of Sussex as juniors in college. We married in the US in the mid 90s, and twenty years later, thought it would be romantic to renew our wedding vows in the little English village where we met.
I bought a white dress, new shoes, and a wheelbarrow’s worth of undergarments meant to turn back the clock on my figure. I packed them all, along with Tim’s suit, into a special garment bag to keep them safe from the Darwinian environment of the suitcase.
At the airport, we watched the family suitcase, the garment bag, and my sister-in-law’s suitcases flop onto the belt that would lead them to the belly of a plane. Our plane, I hoped. “Wouldn’t it be funny if the luggage got lost and we had to do the ceremony in what we’re wearing now?” I said to Tim, glancing down at my jeans and his shorts.
The church where the ceremony would take place was ancient, a thousand years old, made of local stone. It was the sort of place that felt sacred not due to its nature as a place of worship, but due to its stolid permanence through the passage of time. It seemed a fitting metaphor for the marriage sacrament, and I did not intend to show my respect for it in jeans and a t-shirt.
We arrived at Heathrow early in the morning. The line for Immigration snaked back and forth through a warehouse of a room. When it was our turn, the woman who had the power to grant us entry studied our passports. She examined Tim’s photograph and then his face. “Looks like you’ve lost weight,” she said. “Good man.” She smiled at him, stamped his passport, and handed it back to him. He flushed with pleasure at the compliment and thanked her.
I handed over my passport and eagerly awaited the nice thing she would say to me. Her eyes flicked from my passport photo to my face, photo to face. She handed the little blue book back to me and said, “Well. We won’t say anything to you.” She waved us through. One wheelbarrow full of Spanx would obviously be insufficient.
We collected our circling luggage, passed through Customs, and made our way to the train. I was dearly looking forward to getting some rest at the hotel. We were all groggy from the overnight flight. I chalked up my sense that something wasn’t right to sleeplessness and unsolicited opinions about my weight.
As the train pulled up, I couldn’t silence the vague but nagging sensation. I did a quick count of all our vital numbers. Four children. Check. Four adults, check. One, two, three bags. Three, not four. “Tim, where’s the the suitcase with the wedding clothes?”
He circled the column he was leaning against as though the bag may have been playing hide-and-seek. “We must’ve left it on the baggage carousel. I’ll go get it.” The wedding was the entire reason we were in England. How could we have left something so important behind?
Retrieving the bag was easier said than done. Airport security does not just let you (in the immortal words of Prince) walk in through the out door, out door. There are rules. Procedures.
A security guard showed Tim a special phone to call for an escort back to baggage claim. Tim waited there to be collected with a young woman who shifted from foot to foot to comfort a squalling infant. Let’s call her Abby. Abby sounds like the name of someone unlikely to be fat shamed at the border. While they waited together, she unloaded her tale.
Abby had just kidnapped her own daughter. She was a British citizen who had married a man native to a Caribbean island, where they had, until the night before, lived together for several years. He was a possessive sort. Abby was surprised to find that he had destroyed her passport so she couldn’t leave the country. On the down low, she applied for and received a new passport which she buried in the flower bed for six months until her opportunity to escape arrived. When her husband went for a half-day fishing trip, Abby dug up the passport and fled to the airport with their infant. She hoped that being in Britain when she filed for divorce would go more favorably for her when it came to custody of their child. She was so relieved to have made it back to British soil, she forgot her bag on the carousel. It was the bag that contained all of the proof that the baby was hers.
The escort wound Tim and Abby through the airport. All the way back through the airport. They went through security, immigration (where Tim no doubt had a grand chat with his favorite slender-man-loving border guard, though he didn’t mention it) and finally, to the stopped carousel. They retrieved their respective bags, and gave an embarrassed apology to their escort. He said, “No worries. Last week some lady left her baby here in a car seat.”
A skinny lady no doubt.
Interesting travel articles roundup:
Check out a map that tells you if treasure has been found in your neighborhood
Ladies rejoice! These men do not pee on the seat. Let’s hear it for the sitzpinklers of Germany
Free Reading Ahead
A dozen or more free books and stories about far off places, including my own How to Ruin Your Day in Santorini. Great beach reads. Take a mental vacation.
Absolutely loved this post, Eileen! Happy Substack anniversary (we're only a week apart in that respect!).
I live a 25-minute drive from the UoS campus, believe it or not! And I noticed that the church in which you had renewed your wedding vows was built of the same Sussex flint as so many around here. Wonderful.
Great link to the art of Sitzpinkeln - when I was an au pair in Germany I was surprised that the young boy in the family sat down to pee. I asked him if he had ever 'stehpinkelt' - and he told me I was crazy! 🤣
Charming. Excelsior!