Our Wedding

“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” 

When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

In the midst of a global pandemic, when the future was so uncertain, we knew that it wouldn’t be a traditional wedding. 

Our wedding planning all started months ago in our small Upper West Side studio apartment. We began planning our wedding together the day after we got engaged (but if you know anything about Mia, you would know that she had really been planning her wedding day since she was a little girl). Without all the answers and with a lot of moments of “wait..., what!?”, we began planning the day that would mark the beginning of our lives together. And like in the movie quote, we both agreed that we wanted that day to start as soon as possible, before the situation with COVID-19 in New York, and in the world, got worse.

Truth be told, the process was anything other than what we expected wedding planning would look like. After weeks of discussing, we came to an agreement that three things were most important for us for our special day:

• we knew that we would have multiple, nontraditional wedding celebrations. Because of the fact that our families and friends live on opposite sides of the coasts and, well, the world! Hawaii, California, New York, Austria and Slovakia, to name a few.
• we wanted our wedding to be intimate, peaceful, and relaxed.
• we wanted it to be connected with nature.

With all these things in mind, we chose Piermont in Rockland County in New York State. A place we have frequented for weekend bike trips, and let’s be honest here, drank a lot of coffee.

And so we began the process of gathering everything we needed to get married. Mia’s family initially had somewhat of a treasure hunt trying to find her birth certificate and then shipped it overnight with FedEx Express from Hayward, CA. Mine was in Slovakia, written in my mother tongue, and so it needed to be scanned, translated to English, and shipped to our apartment in NYC. The twist in this story is that my parents shipped a copy of my birth certificate to NYC that was a different version than the one they had scanned to me earlier in the week since they thought it was in better physical shape. 

Although it was nice of them to consider sending us the “better” version, the problem was that there were small differences (albeit, differences nonetheless) between the birth certificates they scanned and shipped! All was resolved though, as I ended up getting the shipped version translated* for our wedding license. It was a coincidence, though, that both of our birth certificates were hand-delivered to our door by the same person! 

*I used https://immitranslate.com/ for the translation service and they were excellent!

Wednesday 

After a full day of work, we tried on our wedding clothes and prepared our backpacks with the essentials for our four-day journey ahead! We also each created our “Just Married” cardboard signs that would hang on the outside of our backpacks for the bike ride home. 

We carefully packed our backpacks for the journey, mindful that we would carry the weight of everything inside. We packed just enough clean clothes for 4 days, our sweet stuffed animal Otto the otter, who would also be our ring bearer during the ceremony, a special analog camera, and plenty of snacks for the ride up.

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Thursday

Our alarm went off bright and early and we went on our morning walk to Central Park. With a goal to leave our apartment before 9:30 AM (added by Martin: it was 9:00 AM), we quickly made our classic breakfast - scrambled eggs, waffles, bacon, and coffee. Our backpacks were not the lightest, but after a few adjustments were able to ride our bikes comfortably.

Our mission was to arrive at Orangeburg Town Clerk before noon to meet Rosana, the most wonderful and cheerful town clerk you ever did meet, who would give us our marriage license that day and officiate our marriage the following.

Mission was accomplished - we arrived in Orangeburg at 11:20 AM and met Rosana. Besides we were welcomed as a first couple that bikes to Orangeburg to get married, we obtained our marriage license. The whole process was very pleasant, although we had to wear face masks and our glasses were fogged sometimes. We managed to sign ourselves at the right documents. Big success!

Before we found our AirBnB, we spent some time in Piermont to get lunch (Piermont Pig sandwich from the Community Market is definitely recommended) and rode around the town a bit on our bikes. 

Our AirBnB was a lovely 100+ years old house in Sparkill.

Since we had no food with us and our AirBnB offered no kitchen, our strategy was to explore local kitchens. On Thursday evening, we walked to Sparkill to check a restaurant called Roost. Good food, sitting outside. Since we had no food with us and our AirBnB offered no kitchen, our strategy was to explore local kitchens. On Thursday evening, we walked to Sparkill to check a restaurant called Roost. Good food, sitting outside. 

We called an Uber home around 10 PM.

Friday (Juneteenth 2020 - Freedom Day)

The wedding day. We discovered the tasty breakfast menu in the 9W Market. The market was just across the street and from that morning on, it served us as a breakfast place. 

The wedding was starting at 3:30 PM and we took the whole morning very easy. We went for a short walk in the neighbourhood and found some good photo ops.

I finished my wedding vows too late, but I finished them!

We scheduled an Uber for 2:00 PM. When the time came, the Uber app notified us that the driver is on the way and he is coming at 2:20 PM. That was OK because we needed some extra time anyway. But at 2:20 PM, the driver was not driving towards us. In fact, no driver was assigned for us. We tried different drivers, but nobody around was found. We tried Lyft, no luck there either. So we were sitting in the house at 2:30 PM and we couldn't get us to our wedding. Luckily, Mia had contact with our photographer and she had a car. Mia texted her and the photographer drove us to the town hall on time. Phew! 

Our ceremony was very intimate. We cried a lot. Mostly me. Our little ringbearer Otto was standing next to the officiant. We said our vows to each other on Juneteenth, 2020 with two witnesses - one of which was our photographer.

We brought our stuffed animal Otto to the ceremony, he was our ring bearer. Our rings were made of plastic. At this point, nothing surprising for anyone at our extraordinary wedding ceremony. 

Both of us were crying as we read our vows. The whole ceremony was recorded on my iPhone for our families, so they can see their crying babies getting married. At some point I thought Rosana was not expecting this kind of emotional and heart warming wedding. Perhaps she cried as well. I cannot tell because I couldn’t see well due to tears in my eyes. Definitely a very special and unforgettable ceremony for everybody.

Mia was also wearing her two engagement rings: one made in Hawaii from Koa wood and another with diamond.

After the ceremony we went for a several hours long photoshoot in Piermont and nearby forest in Blauvelt State Park. We had a great time but if that photoshoot would take another hour, I think it would have collapsed.

After the photoshoot we invited our photographer for a drink to Pier 701 restaurant & bar in Piermont. 

After that, we were done. We had a nice dinner for the two of us in an Italian restaurant in Piermont. We called Uber and fell asleep asap.

Saturday

After breakfast at 9W Market, we went for a long morning walk to Tappan. The walk was pretty long, we actually crossed the border with New Jersey. There we found a very nice cafe called Roots Café. Mia had fun with two little friendly goats.

I mentioned, casually, to a woman at the cafe that we got married yesterday. She was, in fact, one of the owners of the cafe, and we got a free cake.

When we came back to our AirBnB home, Mia took a nap and I went to explore a very new bike lane on the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. It was fun, but it was a bit packed for my taste. The problem I had with the bike lane on the bridge was that it was practically shared with pedestrians and it was bidirectional.

We had no energy to go out and at the same time, our wedding photos were available online for us to see. We spent our evening with delivered food, phones and mosquitos on the front porch. I had an urge to celebrate with a bottle of wine, so I ran to 9W Market to get us one. It was a good and cold white wine produced in Germany.

Sunday

Easy morning. We packed everything and attached our “Just Married” cardboard signs on our backpacks. Before we left the AirBnB, we had a little dance and then we said goodbye to Chirpie, the house cat.

We decided to bike across the Hudson river via the Cuomo Bridge and then follow the bike path from Westchester county to NYC. 

We stopped along the Saw Mill River to break for lunch. It was not the cleanest river but good enough to cool down our feet (much relief amidst such a hot and humid day) and observe wildlife. 

We had a great time on our bikes. More and more people congratulated us as we made our journey as husband and wife back into the city: pedestrians, bikers and even people in their cars.

Mrs and Mr Gajdosik arrived home around 7 PM.

And by the way, we saw ‘When Harry Met Sally’ together in Bryant Park during the summer of 2018, as colleagues at NYU Langone Health Radiology Department.

Written by The Gajdosiks

Thanks ...

We want to thank Rosana and the Orangeburg Town Hall who were incredibly kind, helpful, and generous. They made our micro wedding very special. Our photographer also has our many thanks as well for capturing our special moments. We love all the photos so much. At last but not least our AirBnB hosts, which made us feel right at home.