Home
Our Story
The Proposal
The Campout
Announcement
The Wedding Party
The Ceremony
Details
Directions
Registry
Accommodations
GuestBook
Gallery

TracyAndTom.com

The Campout

The Chronicle.  September 1, 2006.

 

Tenting for a Chapel wedding

Sarah Ball

Tom Rose doesn't look like a hopeless romantic.

In fact, with his orange walkie-talkie-"from Home Depot!"-his glinting gold earring and his man-sized Neoprene tent zipped tightly to ward off the rain, he looks more like a goateed Outward Bound counselor.

Rose is indeed on a mission, but it doesn't involve dehydrated rations.

The Pratt '05 graduate will marry the woman of his dreams exactly one year from today--and if camping out to reserve the hallowed neo-Gothic Duke Chapel sanctuary for his wedding is what it takes, so be it.

"I'm here to be first in line," Rose said from in front of his tent, nodding toward the Chapel.

The 23-year-old employee of the Delta Smart House filled a tent Thursday with provisions, furniture and bones for his dog Max, braving inclement weather and student ogling to be first in line for a September 2007 Chapel wedding.

"The hurricane's sorta helping me out--I think there'd usually be a lot more people out here," Rose said, water droplets spattering his Duke cap. "But we'll see."

And Rose's stakeout plans extended beyond the Chapel lawn. A few of his buddies were simultaneously shacked up outside of the Doris Duke Center, trying to reserve the Sarah P. Duke Gardens for the reception.

"We're a team," Rose said.

That team includes his future mother-in-law, his fianc?e Tracy Lipps and his college roommate, among others--all of whom are rotating shifts and communicating via the walkie-talkie system Rose has in place.

Brides- and bridegrooms-to-be have long coveted the Chapel as an ideal nuptials setting, but landing a Saturday afternoon berth has become more difficult.

Staff recently reduced the number of Saturday wedding slots from four per Saturday to three, wedding coordinator Mollie Keel said.

Those slots are usually filled the second they become available--a year in advance.

"This is common," Keels said, referring to the extreme measures Rose was taking. "We try not to get involved in [the tenting] process, but it seems to have become a part of the Duke experience."

Camping out on campus grass, not an unfamiliar practice to Duke basketball fans, is becoming more popular for the enfianced. Couples can reserve the Chapel on the first of every month, one year in advance of the month they'd like to get married.

"A while back we had about six tents out there," Keels said, referring to earlier months. "And they'd posted a sign out there that said 'Mollie-ville.'" Sound familiar?

"Coach K has got nothing on us!" Keel joked.

But competition for a Chapel spot pales in comparison to trying to reserve the gardens, Rose said.

"They only allow one wedding reception per Saturday, and Duke has already blacked out a few weekends in September for University stuff," he said. "There are like six couples gunning for three spots."

"Could get ugly," he added.

If he succeeds in reserving both venues, Rose said a Duke wedding is just the finishing flourish on a knee-weakeningly romantic courtship.

"We met in high school," he said of Lipps, a 2005 graduate of Emory University and a second-year student at the School of Medicine. "I proposed to her on her birthday at the bottom of a volcano in Nicaragua."

Adventurous, indeed. Outward Bound honeymoon?