Our Wedding: The Morning After

Posted on December 21st, 2010 by Tonia 1 Comment

Oh, you thought the festival was over?? Ha!  You obviously don’t know how we roll!  We’d never end things like that.  Much merriment, drinking, and dancing during the night calls for much eating of delicious breakfast food the next morning!!  So, after scraping ourselves out of our warm and comfy beds, we all caravan over to the Bigga Man. 

The Bigga Man is not actually what the place is called…it’s actually Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty.  But my Italian-immigrant bisnonno {great-grandfather}, who brought his family up to Northern Wisconsin to go fishing, took one look at the enormous painted sign out in front of the shanty and exclaimed, “That’s a bigga man!”  So…Paul Bunyan’s has been Bigga Man ever since.

Anyways, this place is awesome.  It is an old log cabin converted into an all-you-can-eat restaurant, food served family-style by servers dressed like lumberjacks and lumberjills.  My family has been coming here every summer for years- especially whenever our Italian relatives come to visit. 

You sit on long wooden benches at long wooden tables with enamelware utensils, plates and cups.  Huge bowls of powdered sugar donuts, flapjacks {be careful, they expand in your stomach…} eggs, eggs, and more eggs, ham, bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy keeps coming to the table in a steady stream until you look at your server with watery eyes and lift your hand in a “stop…please, stop…” motion {because you can’t speak.  You are reduced to sign-language after that last bite of egg.} 

Even more entertaining than the food is the gift shop.  Taxidermied foxes, taxidermied fischers, quaint little wood-carvings of wolves, sweatshirts with wolves and Native American designs screen printed on them, cross-cut logs with deer painted on them,  real rabbit-foot key chains, and “Indian war hatchets” fill every corner, every inch of the tiny space.  “Northwoods mementos” is what they call these things. 

The best part is watching little kids beg their parents for a taxidermied field mouse that’s been mounted onto a woodland scene {a piece of wood, with moss glued on it, and a mouse posed in a terrible defensive position as if one of the taxidermied owls is about to come back to life and eat it}…the look on the parents’ faces makes the stomach-ache you now have from the Magical Expandable Flapjacks totally worth it.

It was a great morning, and nice to relax with our guests, chat and laugh together one last time before all going our separate ways.  For Mike and me, that way meant Kaua’i.  We were pretty dang excited about getting on the plane and heading to the beach, which made saying goodbye to all our friends and family a little easier.  But it was tough to process the fact that the weekend was over.  Part of us wanted to do it all again, and part of us was just so satisfied, tired, and content that we were completely fine with it being over.

Perhaps I’ll do a post about the honeymoon sometime in January when we’re all really sick and tired of the snow and cold, so we can live vicariously through the photos of sun, sand, and dolphins.

That’s all, folks!  We’re just old married people now. :)

One Comment

  1. […] year: Setting up/rehearsal, getting ready, the ceremony, the details, the dinner, the dancing, the next day. Tags: anniversary, love, […]

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