Wedding Woes

I have a wedding to attend this weekend, but I honestly have very little desire to attend. I would be alright with this if this were a friend of my wife's or something, but it is not. Nope, this is a friend of mine. Okay, "friend" might be an extremely loose usage of the word. This is someone who I use to hang out with about once a month with a bunch of other people. We had some good times, but we never were incredibly close or anything. In fact, I was closer to this person's sibling than I was to them. About three years ago this person basically left town and brushed all of us out of the picture. They breezed back in about a year later and have been in town since.

I have seen this person exactly zero times in the last year. I have spoken with this person exactly zero times in the last year. Then all of a sudden they call me out of the blue. I quickly cut to the chase of "What is this phone call about?" and they say guess. Okay. Either they are getting married or someone has died, and they sound way too happy to be calling about a death. So I shoot with the marriage card with great success.

Then the invitation came. The reply went out. And now I am going to a wedding that I'd rather not go to. It's on the south side of the city, which means it's going to take a while to get there. Add to that fact that the wedding starts at 2pm and the reception starts at 6pm, and there's a lot of time to kill in between there. I would rather come home than kill time, but the reception (being held in Illionois) is basically in the opposite direction of home. So we are looking at trying to kill about 3 hours of time between a wedding neither one of us really wants to go to and a reception that we would rather miss. At least I will get a chance to visit with this "friends" sibling at the reception.

Is there any vaild reason why we couldn't just skip the whole affair and send then a gift with our regrets? Or does the fact that we have already RSVP'd to the reception basically make us obligated to attend?