PITTSFIELD – It poured rain on Saturday, Oct. 15, the day Barry Brooks of Pittsfield and Amy Getchell of Ripley got married at the First Baptist Church in Pittsfield.

“They say it is good luck if it rains on your wedding day,” Carol Getchell, mother of the bride, said Wednesday. The wedding was so lovely and the reception so festive that everyone felt the rain was a good omen.

But for the newlyweds, it turns out it wasn’t.

A week and a half after their wedding – and a week after Hurricane Wilma stalled over Cancun, Mexico, and destroyed their honeymoon hotel – the couple remain trapped in what they thought was going to be paradise.

They have been unable to get on any outgoing flights and have been living in a shelter that has no operating bathrooms, no power and only a single functioning pay phone. With 25 people per room, there is no privacy, and Amy Brooks told her mother that people are holding up a towel for each other as they use a can as a toilet.

“I told her that if they can survive this, their marriage can survive anything,”‘ Getchell said.

There is no cell phone service, so Brooks waits in line for at least an hour each day for a five-minute call home to Maine.

“Yesterday, for the first time since the hurricane, they took a walk on the beach, but they couldn’t go swimming because the water is so contaminated,” Getchell said. “They were so exhausted from the wedding that all they wanted to do when they got to Cancun was sleep and relax.”

But last Wednesday, all that changed. The couple had spent the day sightseeing at ancient ruins and made a call to a very frantic Getchell late in the day.

“Amy told me they had heard some rumors that a hurricane was coming. I told them to turn on the television and try to get out of there, that a category five was headed right for them,” Getchell said.

The young couple went to dinner and returned to the honeymoon suite at Dreams Cancun Resort & Spa to find a note under their door telling them to put their belongings in the bathtub, pack one small bag and come to the hotel lobby for evacuation.

Brooks was able to call her mother once on Saturday, after they had been placed in a shelter, a school, with hundreds of other tourists, most of them Americans. “She said the eye [of the storm] was directly over them, and it was just barely sprinkling,” Getchell said.

On Sunday, that changed. The windows in the shelter had blown out, and Brooks was only able to tell her mother “that night was hell” before crying. “She really won’t talk about much more,” Getchell said.

On Monday, things got even worse. Those at the shelter were put into five buses to drive south to a damaged but still standing resort, Puerto Aventuras.

“The bus ahead of Amy and Barry rolled over into the water, and they had to break the windows to get the people out,” Getchell said. “Amy then had to get off her bus because she was sick, and the bus left without her.” The newlyweds were picked up by the next bus in line, she said.

“It has been torture,” Getchell said of the wait for her daughter and son-in-law’s safety to be ensured. Getchell and her husband, Linal Getchell, have remained by the telephone day and night.

“I’ve been in touch with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, and they have been very helpful,” the mother said. “They told me they have Americans stranded in 170 different shelters.”

Getchell has been ferrying messages to some of those American families, passed on by her daughter.

Getchell said the couple has booked a flight on Delta to Atlanta for today, but so many of the flights have been canceled that she is unsure if they will be on it.

“There are no guarantees because the Mexican government has taken control of all the airports, and they are determining who goes and who stays,” she said.