'I drove eight hours for a wedding. We weren't allowed to eat dinner with the bride and groom.'

When Jill* and Amy* received an invitation to their colleague's wedding, it marked the beginning of an exciting journey. 

The pair, who worked together and were "excited" to celebrate the special day, hired a car and drove eight hours to the Scottish highlands to a bed-and-breakfast where they planned to stay the night. 

In a now-viral Reddit post, Jill explained she had felt "honoured" to be invited as a then-20-year-old who was attending her first wedding that wasn't family members.

Watch: How much should a wedding dress cost? Post continues after video. 

After meeting the owner of the B&B, the pair accepted the offer of a ride to the church where the ceremony would take place. 

"The wedding ceremony was so lovely, with Celtic hand tying and a candle ceremony," Jill recalled. "We take pictures of the bride, mingle with other guests and get on the transport to the reception where the dinner would be."

But when Jill and Amy arrived at the venue, they couldn't find their names on the table seating plan.

Not long after, the Master of Ceremonies, the 'MC' at a wedding who helps everything run smoothly, asked to see their invitation, clearly unconvinced they were invited guests. 

"[He] asks to see our invites to which he flatly states we were only invited to the church and evening drinks and that we need to leave," Jill said. "It was in tiny small print that our invite wasn't for the meal."

Feeling "absolutely mortified," the pair slipped away into the highlands of Scotland to find somewhere to eat and "waste time for five hours".

Upon returning to their B&B, the owner heard their story and was "furious".

"We actually got told off for not calling her! She then drove us back to the evening ceremony at 7pm," Jill said before adding she and Amy found out more details about their invitation that ruined their evening even further. 

"By this point, everyone at the venue was sloppy drunk as they'd been drinking for five hours and we find out we were THE ONLY 'evening guests,'" she said. "We tried to enjoy ourselves but slipped away at 10pm as the single men were VERY handsy. We got a lift from a kind local and went to a local bar where we were entertained by more locals who had heard of our fate from the B&B owner (news travels fast in small Scottish villages)."

While Scottish locals went out of their way to welcome the pair into their small town, with even an impromptu ceilidh performance and Scottish dancing, Jill and Amy were hurt by the bride and groom's decision to exclude them from dinner. 

"Neither my colleague (who [is] now a friend by the end of the trip, shared trauma bonds) nor I had realised we weren't included in the whole event and the bride later let it slip she only invited people from the office because our boss had told her it was the polite thing to do," Jill wrote. "We had thought we were friends with her."

The work friends did get their revenge though by removing a $200 cash gift from their card for the bride and groom and only leaving the "beautiful bedding set [from] her registry" they had purchased.

"Learning point from it all [is that] I now scrutinise wedding invites and if I'm only invited to the evening part, that's cool, but at least I'm informed," Jill wrote in the ending of her post. 

Her story has gone viral online, including TikTok where one user retold the story with minor changes to Jill's Reddit post.

Jill later explained that upon returning to work and telling her colleagues (and her boss who couldn't make it to the wedding) about what had happened, the bride "wasn't fussed and didn't see anything wrong with it."

She also said that despite seeing the humour in the story, their experience was made worse because the bride "knew it was a tiny place with nowhere to really go [except for] a pub that only opened in the evening and one small cafe."

"I genuinely think they were hoping we wouldn't attend but we had told her our plans, about our accommodation, etc. The reaction of our landlady was hilarious. She was apoplectic with secondhand rage on our behalf," Jill said. 

Like Jill and Amy, others were able to find the humour in the story as well with one Reddit user writing, "This sounds like a great plot for a girl's trip movie, though I'm sorry you lived through it. That's very odd and rude knowing you were driving all that way to pick and choose when you were included."

*Names have been changed for privacy.

Feature Image: Getty.