Our Story (part 5) - engaged

We got engaged in mid-May.  We planned to be married before uni started in mid-September so we soon got thinking about a date.  We settled on 1st September.  I refused any Saturday before that because I wanted to make sure it was after my 20th birthday.  1st September also gave us a couple of weeks for a honeymoon before uni started.  So we had three and a half months to plan the wedding.  Quite possibly the worst three and a half months of my life.  All sorts of difficulties were thrown our way and at different times both of us came close to calling off the whole thing.

I moved back to Reading for the summer and Adam went back to his parents' house in Louth.  He was struggling to find enough work and we were miserable apart from each other.  After just a couple of days of this (I must have been awful to be around) my Mom suggested that Adam move down to Reading and stay in the small room.  We thought it would be much easier to get summer work in Reading and then we'd be happier together too.  A couple of days later Adam spent 8 hours hitch hiking down to Reading from Louth.  He managed to get a lift from Louth by going to the truck depot and hitching a ride down to London.  From there he hitch hiked down the M4.  Only there are 3 junctions for Reading on the M4 and he got the wrong one and ended up walking about 6 miles the rest of the way to our house.

We managed to get very glamorous jobs for the summer... working at McDonalds.  It was about a 20 min walk, so was pretty convenient and we got a really high pay rate because the manager was really keen to hire us, since we were quite a bit older than the usual McDonalds employee.  We ended up on a higher hourly rate than most of the teenage supervisors there.  Not that we let them know that :)  So while we didn't get a huge amount of job satisfaction from it, we did manage to earn enough money to start us out and book a honeymoon.  Downside was we put on a bit of weight because you were allowed to eat a meal if you had a full day shift...

I'd rather not dwell too much on the engagement period because most of what I remember was stressful and not all that enjoyable.  The usual wedding planning went on, and as most people who've planned their own wedding will know, it's not as fun as you might think it would be.

I had my hen night on the Thursday before the wedding.  We went to TGI Fridays where I had not one but two obscenely shaped balloons given to me.  (They thought the first one had accidentally popped, so replaced it....).  We had some fun games after.  Most memorable story of the night was hearing how Janette had done a poo in the sea when she was 16.....