'I survived a 21 hour car ride to a Virginia wedding and a Waffle House standoff.' UPDATED
"The Waffle House Wedding Weekend."
Ages ago I was dating a woman who had a large family that she generally kept away from me. I didn't have any idea what they were like until we all traveled from the North East to Virginia for a wedding.
The person getting married was a cousin of the woman I was dating. The plan was to drive down to Virginia on a Friday morning and drive back Sunday night. I was going to drive us down but, her father insisted that we ride with him.
After all, he had a large comfortable SUV and we could relax in the back seat for the ride. Against my better judgement, I agreed and we drove down with him. We had a couple of months notice about this wedding. I had made it clear that I needed to be back by 9 AM that Monday because of work responsibilities that I could not offload on other people.
I confirmed with the woman I was dating a couple of times a week for two months that she had communicated this to her father and he was alright with leaving Sunday night and not Monday night.
The morning of the trip we drove to her father's house. His big comfortable SUV sat in the driveway while his hatchback commuter car sat idling in the street in front of his house. I bit my tongue as he and his son in law loaded everything into the hatchback and stared blankly as we were directed to get in the back.
The car was so crammed that my feet were on a bag on the floor with my knees up and chest level. Still, I was polite, I said nothing. The woman I was dating and I exchanged quiet glances several times as we made it to the highway.
About 10 miles into the trip, on a major highway near NYC, her father starts talking about our expected return on Monday night. I looked to the woman I was dating, who refused to look at me, then I chimed in stating I had to be back for 9am Monday, that I had checked with her multiple times each week for two months to make sure she communicated it.
Her father was surprised. He had no idea. She had been fibbing about talking to him about it. As we drove I began considering my options. As I was asking to be let off at the next gas station, where I could catch a cab and return home since my needs were not compatible with the plans this woman and her father had apparently agreed to, he reluctantly agreed to return Sunday night.
One the way down to Virginia, her father and his son in law shared the driving. On the interstate highway, this involved driving at 45 MPH in the fast lane. They would ultimately somehow get lost bringing us to Philadelphia then DC then somehow West Virginia before we ultimately arrived in whatever town in eastern Virginia we were headed to.
It was 7am and her father had arranged for everyone to go to Waffle House, a franchise I had heard of and seen but never visited before that day. 21 hours folded into the back of a two door hatchback with your knees pressed to your chest is a physically challenging thing to endure. We had stopped twice for gas, at which point we spent a few minutes outside the car, but otherwise we were crammed in there.
I was surprised at how many people had shown up. Her family effectively filled this Waffle House. The woman I was dating and I sat at a small table with one of her cousins and the man she was dating. I had met this man once before in passing, "Dave". I took one look at him that morning and realized he had been through a similar ordeal.
He quietly told me that they had left on Thursday morning. His girlfriend's father, an uncle to the woman I was dating, drove them from Connecticut through Pennsylvania to Ohio to get to eastern Virginia. They had spent Thursday night in a motel in Pittsburgh to get from Western Connecticut to eastern Virginia.
The Waffle House was staffed by two women - a waitress and her daughter, who worked the griddle. The waitress started at the far end of the restaurant taking orders and delivering food and slowly worked her way to our end. We walked into the Waffle House at 7AM on Saturday morning.
Dave and I were the last two who got to place an order. At this point we had been there about an hour. We ordered some sort of meal that had grits, toast, eggs, and coffee. We both asked to hold the grits, for eggs over easy, and for black coffee.
As we waited to be fed, it became clear that the rest of the larger group was getting ready to leave. The group - let's say there were 30 people, which is probably a conservative estimate - slowly over the course of maybe 15 minutes began standing, stretching, getting their acts together.
When our food was finally brought to us, we saw that the woman working the griddle had supplemented our meals with a dozen additional eggs over easy to make up for us asking for no grits. Dave and I were both shocked as a platter of eggs were placed on the table between us.
We looked at one another somewhat stoically. We had sat there patiently waiting to order while everyone else was served. After 21 hours in the back of that car with nothing to eat aside from a granola bar, I looked at the crowd who were now all staring at me and realized that they were expecting us to stand up and leave despite having just been served.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I began enjoying my breakfast. So did Dave. We took our time eating. We chatted about tv shows while we ate, asked for more coffee, and the two of us ate every last morsel of food.
I have no idea how I ate a total of 8 eggs over easy but, I did. I even ate those hash browns that I normally don't touch. The group watching us continued to watch us for the most part. One or two cars of people left but, there were four cars worth of people who walked out with us.
That weekend was truly bizarre. Everyone was staying at an aunt's house. This meant that some people pitched tents in the backyard. I had been under the impression that we would be staying at a hotel. Turns out that wasn't true, either.
Dave and I were effectively ostracized. The large group of family members there would not speak more than a few words to us with the exception of the aunt who owned the house and our girlfriends. Dave and I were given throw pillows and blankets and wound up having to sleep on the slate floor near the door because there was no other place.
We slept for a few hours before everyone started getting up to go to the reception. Dave and I wore suits, our girlfriends wore nice dresses. There was some issue with the cars so we called a cab for the four of us to go to the reception.
The wedding was at the reception hall and took all of maybe 10 minutes. The reception started immediately. About half the people there were dressed as if they were going shopping at a mall. Within 30 minutes dozens of people were drunk and the party descended into chaos.
During this party we watched as some of the aunts got so drunk that they stood on the balconies sobbing uncontrollably, we watched some of the uncles and many of the male cousins strip down to undershirts or bare chests on the dance floor. We watched as the father of the woman I was dating was prancing around the dance floor waving his shirt over his head with his pants drooping beneath his ass.
We watched someone lean too far back in a chair and fall over backwards into a large mirror affixed to a wall, cracking it - and we watched as basically no one reacted to that. This wedding reception had decayed into a nightmare party.
I looked over at the bride multiple times throughout the night. She sat at the head table alone with her new husband. They were stone cold sober. She watched with slackened jaw as her wedding reception fell into chaos. I observed from the other side of the room.
We sat at the table for a couple of hours and in that time I saw nobody even approach the bride or groom. Eventually the situation there became too much and the four of us skipped out. We went to a nearby hotel for the night.
With the reception slated to end around 10 PM, and us leaving around 7 PM, I felt bad for the bride and groom for however the situation would escalate after we left. Around 11:30 PM phones started ringing.
The Bride was calling our girlfriends looking for help. So we went back to the venue. The place was a mess. The party had winded down and just about everyone there was in no condition to drive. The bride had asked us to help shuttle people to the aunt's house.
My thought was 'leave them where they are', seeing some people just flat out passed out. But, we started shuttling people. Some people who could barely walk opted to drive themselves and I saw the people who worked at the venue pick up the phone as they observed this to call in the drunk drivers.
After spending a while helping a bride shuttle incapacitated family members home on her wedding night, I returned alone to my hotel room and went to sleep. Meeting up with Dave the following day, Sunday, he was talking about how he had to be to work the following day.
He didn't know how he was going to get back yet since the driver he came down with had spent 20 minutes throwing up all over the inside of his own car the night before. My girlfriend called me around noon or so to report that everyone was already drinking again and things were getting out of hand at the aunts house, that we would not be driving back that night.
Dave and I rented a car and drove home, leaving before 2 PM. The trip back took maybe 6 hours. We did not get lost and wind up in DC, Philadelphia, Ohio, or West Virginia. The trip home was smooth and uneventful.
I spoke to that girlfriend upon her return. She told me about how the family hated Dave and I because we are selfish and only think about ourselves for not getting up without eating at the Waffle House and for needing to be back to work that Monday.
Dave was accused of throwing up all over the inside of the uncle's car because "Dave can't handle alcohol" - Dave doesn't drink, though, it's just not his thing but I guess it was important for the uncle to blame someone else for his own vomit.
We were both also considered very rude for sleeping on the slate floor for four hours, it was suggested that we should have slept on the porch or driveway - although the aunt who owned the home argued against that. We were blamed for the damage to the floor at the venue and the broken mirror. Something had happened with the cake after we had left and we were blamed for that, too.
I never spoke to that girlfriend again after that. The experience was so ridiculous and embarrassing that we agreed during that call to break up. She kept apologizing to me about everything.
Dave and I kept in touch for a while. He, too, broke it off with his girlfriend after that weekend. He wound up meeting someone nice and getting married a year later. There's a lot more that happened with this family after these events but, this is already super long so I'll save that for another time.
Here’s what people had to say to OP:
I was waiting for the priest to show up at the waffle houseš¤£
I'm really glad you and Dave had eachother for this experience.
Actually worth the read. Props for making a quick decision and breaking it off right after! Sounds horrid.
You saved yourself from marrying into crazy. I'd say the story alone was worth the trip. Bizarre!
Yeah I'm going to need the rest of those stories with that family.
The next day, the OP returned with an update.
I alluded to there being more to story. A number of people asked for it so I'm taking some time today to provide that follow-up. Some crucial context to this and the previous story is that the woman I was dating, "Sarah", her parents were divorced and her father remarried.
Sarah lived with her mother, who was a corporate lawyer, because the housing market here is so crazy that a lot of people over the last 30 years have lived with parents well into adulthood because it's so difficult to afford a home and so difficult to find an apartment. I met both Lynn and Sarah through "Tiger Woods" (not the real Tiger Woods). Tiger Woods was one of the best golfers in the county.
I had met him on the course when he was kind enough to stop and give me some pointers with my swing. I was dealing with a bad back injury at the time and he really helped me. We became good friends and still golf together regularly today something like 20 years later.
Sarah's mother, "Lynn", had warned me about the family many times and had provided me with advice on how to deal with them. When she and Sarah's father were divorced, the family through a party and pronounced Lynn dead.
Some time after we broke up, I changed jobs and quickly learned that Lynn was also employed there in a different group. Lynn and I always got along great. We got into the habit of having lunch together along with two other people who we both knew who were also working there.
After a few months Lynn announced that she was engaged. We had a cake for her. She had been dating the same man for some time and they had decided to tie the knot. Her wedding planning went fairly smoothly as far as I could tell as an outsider.
Let's call Sarah's father "King Kong" because that's easier to type. Plus he thought he was a King and was worshiped as one by his family. Fealty or death. King Kong and Lynn lived several villages away - maybe about a 30 minute drive or so depending on traffic - and never crossed paths.
Plus with Lynn being "dead" there really shouldn't be a reason why King Kong would go out of his way to cross Lynn's path since she was "dead". People don't visit cemeteries often but, they do drive past them and I suppose that's what happened here.
King Kong found out about Lynn's impending nuptials. It was odd to me that the letter would arrive three or four days after she hosted a gathering for her people at her house. There were balloons tied to her mailbox and I think everyone there were bridesmaids and female members of the family.
I saw it because I picked Tiger Woods up to grab lunch, hit the driving range, and whatnot to get him away while they discussed wedding dress options. Three or four days to me is about the amount of time it took for a letter to make it from King Kong's village to Lynn's village given one of those days was a Sunday.
When I heard about the letter I immediately imagined King Kong sitting parked in his car with binoculars spying on Lynn that day. The letter arrived in a red envelope with no return address.
More specifically, the red envelope was an ordinary white envelope that had been colored in red with a red highlighter or marker. The letter was written in black ink on a sheet of printer paper. The paper was heavily indented as if substantial force was used in writing it.
The letter, which was unsigned, was basically one big long attack on Lynn calling her every name in the book, calling her a bad wife and a bad mother, and how dare she think about getting married when she already made her "sacred vow". "You'll get what's coming to you" is how the letter ended.
There was a lot of discussion about who the letter might have come from. King Kong was the obvious guess but, it could have plausibly come from anyone in that family. They were a family with substantial co-dependence and boundary problems and they seemed to have the emotional development of children based on what I had been exposed to.
The letter hung heavily on Tiger Wood's head - so much so that he stopped golfing, stopped going out on weekends when he could avoid it, to stay at home for fear that the nut-job family of Lynn's ex would do something to their home.
Then the first foot fell - Sarah, who I had not seen or spoken to since the Virginia wedding, told her mother that she would not be going to the wedding. She cited the problems it was causing with her father and his family, and apparently the situation there had decayed to the point where Sarah's step mother and father were attempting to have Sarah declared incompetent to gain stronger control over her.
This was about the time that Lynn stopped talking about her wedding at work.
Weeks passed and I had not heard from Tiger Woods. By the time the wedding came along, I was dating a woman who was a chef and who owned a venue that people would hire to host weddings, parties, and other such events. She came with me to this wedding.
Lynn and Tiger Woods were going to have a quick ceremony at the venue, which hosted their reception. We arrived on time and had missed everything! But, I got all the gossip!
King Kong showed up to the venue close to two hours before Lynn, who arrived extra early with her bridal party to get ready in the bridal suite. King Kong showed up drunk. The valet wasn't even on duty at that point.
He had left his car running - the same hatchback we drove to Virginia - in the parking lot and made such a show stumbling up the steps into the reception hall that two of the people who worked there noticed and stopped him.
Inside the lobby, he was shouting for Lynn and only got louder when he saw people he somehow knew were in the wedding party. He started getting physical which resulted in some men who worked there and a groomsman having to restrain him as best they could.
King Kong was not a big man, though. He was a small man who was wiry and he managed to put up quite a fight. But, they managed to get him out the door and into the parking lot, where he was soon arrested.
King Kong had written the letter. According to what I heard, he had admitted to the police that he would sit in his car down the road a bit and watch Lynn's home, and he did so "to protect my daughter" even though she didn't live there, or anywhere near there.
I like to think about King Kong's wife going to the police station to bail him out because he was violent, drunk, and uninvited at his ex-wife's wedding, who he had been essentially stalking.
I know what you're all thinking - what happened to his car? Someone had said that King Kong had left it running in the parking lot with the door open and when the police took him away. They did him the solid of locking the doors and closing them so that no one would get into it and steal anything. They did not say they turned the car off.
The only other wedding story I have about this family involved a case of mistaken wedding identity that happened a year or so after this and it's a second hand story but, if you're interested in it I can plan to tell it here in the near future.
Here’s what people had to say to OP:
Wait, so Tiger is Lynn’s husband now? Sorry if I missed that, just clarifying (I was confused for a bit there) Also, I’m really enjoying reading about this drama. It’s fun to read when it’s not happening to you. I’m very sorry you had to go thru this though :(
Anyone else notice how King Kong had moved on and married again, but Lynn was still his property? I'm sure his new wife felt lovely about that! Jeebus! That whole family needs to be given their own deserted island to prevent contamination of their crazy into greater society! (Maybe rig the island with cameras and sell subscriptions... Balance the budget, a la George Carlin.)
OP did the first stupid thing of this story by agreeing to be driven by someone else when he knew he had a hard deadline to return. If the deadline is that hard then you need to take responsibility for your own transport.