Couple Plummet To Wedded Bliss On Cedar Point, Ohio, Water Slide: Watch

SANDUSKY, OH — Their first date was at the Cedar Point amusement park at Sandusky. They got engaged there. So when they decided to take the marriage plunge, what better place than the memory-filled amusement park, where the couple were ensconced in capsules and plummeted into a pool of water during their first moments of wedded bliss.

Steve Gifford, 35, said in a video posted on the Cedar Point Facebook page that he and Rachel Zaborowski, 29, there have been so many milestones as a couple at the park that it made sense to mark “the big milestone” there, too. They were married Wednesday. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Cleveland Patch, or click here to find your local Ohio Patch. Also, if you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

The Springfield, Illinois, couple exchanged their vows and rings at the bottom of the six-story, aqua-body body slide, kissed and then climbed the stairs and into the capsules of the Point Plummet ride. The floor drops out during a near-vertical, 400-foot free fall into a pool of water, a thrill Rachel said made her a bit nervous.

If plunging into a pool of water at bullet-train speed seems to start marriage on a slippery slope, the opposite is true. The way Zaborowski tells the story, she and Gifford didn’t like each other much when the first met, and three years passed before she finally agreed to go out with him. He finally wore her down, Zaborowski told WKYC-TV.

“Truth be told, we are both independent people,” she said, “and somehow found another person that we enjoy having around all the time.”

Their love already has been tested. Rachel recently learned she has the BRCA2 mutation that can cause breast cancer, and a recent screening showed an unexplained mass. She doesn’t know if it’s malignant, but surgery and a lifetime of monitoring lie ahead.

“None of that has shaken him, a confirmed bachelor who decided I was his person,” Rachel told WKYC of her now-husband, a sergeant in the Illinois National Guard. “We were planning on marrying this September, but agreed we would jump at the chance to be married at Cedar Point.”

WKYC live streamed the ceremony and plunge on Facebook.

Photo by Rick Uldricks/Patch.com