Florida wedding mud pit
Kodie Umphenour, 24, popped the question last year at the mud pit, so when it came time to pick a place for their wedding, they decided Hog Waller would be the best venue.
The wedding was actually promoted by Hog Waller, and an estimated 2,000 people showed up. Adults paid the $15 cover charge to watch strangers get married, and children 10 years old and younger entered for free, Charlie Matthews of Hog Waller told ABCNews.com.
Matthews actually made up a poster billing the event as a "big ol' muddy redneck wedding."
It was the first wedding Hog Waller's, and it went off without a hitch.
"She had on a camouflage wedding dress … it was a very beautiful dress for being camouflage," he said. "She even wore an orange bikini underneath in case she fell in the mud."
The bride and groom live in St. Augustine, Fla., and work together at a car salvage yard. They met online. She is a cancer survivor and they were friends at first while, but things changed.
They wrote their own vows, which reflect their love of cars and mud-bogging. "You are the rev to my engine," the vows read, and included the promise to stand by each other "through blown head gaskets … no matter how muddy the trail or how steep the ruts."
"Being a redneck is nothing to be ashamed of. We're just like anybody else; we just have a different idea of fun," Carina Umphenour, 31, said, adding: "It was amazing."
Her sister, an ordained minister, performed the ceremony.
The newlyweds didn't have a traditional honeymoon, but spent the night camping at Hog Waller's with their family and friends. They had toasts and cake at their campsite, danced, played in the mud and went on trail rides. "It was kind of like a normal wedding but a whole lot messier," she said.
Carina Umphenour initially thought to have a quiet courthouse wedding, but her husband wanted to do something small for his family. That plan grew into the celebration at Hog Waller.
She said she wasn't prepared for the interest her wedding has generated.
"It was fun and everybody that attended seemed to really enjoy it. I have had hundreds of friend requests on Facebook, people just wanting to see how we go from here," she said.
St. Johns County resident Kodie Umphenour, 24, and Interlachen native Carina Pasco, 31, were married just after 1 p.m. in the same Hog Waller Mud Bog & ATV mud pit where he proposed to her one year ago.
The county-crossed lovers met on a dating site a little more than a year ago, finding they shared a common passion: mud-bogging.
“He’ll do anything for anybody,” Umphenour’s best man, Stephan Doty, said before the wedding, with the groom’s sister, Autumn Umphenour, with him on a four-wheeler in the ceremony’s precession. “He doesn’t know a stranger.”
“I loved it,” said the groom’s cousin, 14-year-old Micaila Smith, of the ceremony. “Our side of the family are all rednecks, so we’re right at home here.”
The new couple sent out invitations asking people to attend “Our Big Ol’ Muddy Redneck Wedding.”
Longtime friend of Kodie Umphenour, Gerald Drozdowski Jr. smiled as the groom scooped up his new bride for family photos.
“That’s a good kid right there,” Drozdowski said of Kodie. “He’s as redneck as they come, and he is a work horse. If it were my daughter he married, I’d be proud.”
Wedding guests and independent mud-boggers alike laughed and threw globs of wet dirt at one another before the nuptials. But the start of the wedding brought a near hush over the large crowd, some members of which folded their hands and smiled while watching the event.
As requested by a pre-wedding broadcast over the park’s loudspeaker, not one engine was revved during the ceremony.
But as applause broke and the bride descended a metal ladder in her camouflage print wedding gown, a symphony of motors cheered the union.
In a trailer about 40 yards away from the pit in which her son married minutes before, Lisa Umphenour showed off a pastoral-themed, triple-tiered wedding cake and two drinking glasses her new daughter-in-law designed.
She said the couple is far along the learning curve of parenthood.
“She has four kids and he has two, so we’re calling them the Brady Bunch,” Lisa Umphenour said.
The bride’s friend of 10 years and official wedding photographer, Candace Weaver, said Carina made a good choice marrying Kodie.
“I’ve seen a few of the guys she’s dated ... much better,” she said of the groom. “They go so well together, and they both love it out here. I call them to come out to the beach. And they can’t because they’re always here; you can see they love each other.”
Drozdowski said he did his part in steering his friend toward a relationship with his new bride.
“Some of the girls he was with I told him to turn around and run,” he said. “And he turned around and ran, and now he found a good one.”
The bride’s sister and newly ordained minister Angie Pasco officiated the ceremony, asking Kodie and Carina to promise they would remain true to one another “through blown head gaskets, worn-out gears and through big mud holes.”
None of the vows worried the groom, who works with Carina for his parents Lisa Umphenour and Gene Riley at Specialty Auto Parts, the family’s salvage yard in St. Johns County.
One of Kodie Umphenour’s first tasks after Saturday’s Hog Waller reception — and a hopefully restful Sunday — is fixing his mother’s purple pickup truck, which got buried deep in the muck after the wedding when a part broke.
It was yanked out by a monster truck on scene.
“I’ve got to get back to work Monday,” he said. “This is our honeymoon.”
On the mud-caked, knocking and rattling truck carrying the family from the pit to the reception tent above, Austin Downing, 13, embraced the groom’s son, 6-year-old Kodie Umphenour Jr., who held his ears from the sound of revving engines.
Micaila, her arm around a younger cousin, diagnosed the truck’s problem as a broken axle. Outside the tent, the groom agreed, adding that depending on the angle of impact, the truck’s transmission and drive shaft might also need fixing.
“I go to work and work on cars, and I go home and do the same thing,” the groom said. gets mad at me sometimes, but this is what we enjoy. I’ve got seven four-wheelers and four mud trucks at home.”
Joe Pasco said that as a child, his daughter hated to get dirty.
“I asked her about it as we rode up,’ he said of the trip to the altar atop the monster truck. “I said ‘How did you go from that to getting married in a mud pit?’ She said, ‘Oh, Dad, I outgrew that.’”
Riley said his son chose a bride who is a perfect fit for the family.
“He couldn’t have picked a better girl,” Riley said. “And I’m proud they actually got married out there. A lot of people talk about doing it, but they did it.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment