Miss Peacock, Chicago
Age and Occupation: 26, PhD Student
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 29, Internet Whiz
Engagement Date: December 5, 2006
Wedding Date: September, 2008
Blogging Since: December 13, 2007
Venue: St. Clement Church, Cafe Brauer (or a big church wedding and a fancy party at a cafe in Lincoln Park.
About Me: I am a grad student with a secret obsession for all things wedding related. I also love to read, travel, drink champagne and go for walks with our dog, Maisy, and Mr. Peacock. We are planning our very vintage wedding in the greatest city in the world, our hometown of Chicago. I am so proud to be a Bee!
Safe And Sound
March 18th, 2008 @ 1:10 pm by Mrs. Peacock
Mr. Peacock and I are throwing the party of our lives. Every vendor has been considered according to how much they can add to the party - band, caterer, bar options, decor. We want everyone to stay until the last dance and then keep breaking it down all the way to the after party.
When we were considering Medinah for our venue, one of my primary concerns was transportation. I could swing the costs for the bridal party, but renting buses for the entire wedding would be a stretch. Medinah isn’t terribly close to any hotels and none of our friends or family live in the immediate area. I knew that many guests would miss our ceremony or be worrying about getting home if we didn’t rent transportation on a grand scale.
This narrowed our choices to downtown options. Although a good portion of our guests don’t live in Chicago either, there are far more options for public transportation going into or out of the city compared to between the burbs. We also had it on good information that a few of Mr. Peacock’s sisters and our married friends in the suburbs were looking forward to a night in the city and were planning on getting a hotel room. Even with these considerations, we still wanted to help all of our guests to get home safe and sound.
I found these cards in ryanserafin’s knot bio and they got me thinking:
I might word it a little differently, but I thought providing a few options for a safe route home was a great idea. For the most part, you can walk a block from Cafe Brauer to Clark street and catch a cab home or to your hotel. However, with everyone leaving around the same time it might be a bit of a challenge. It will hopefully put that little thought in the back of their mind that maybe they should think twice about driving home after that third martini (you know what they say about three martinis, don’t you? No? Well, that joke is not safe for Weddingbee. Let’s just say the third one is probably one too many).
Are you planning to do anything special to make sure that everyone arrived home safely?
16 Responses to “Safe And Sound”
Luckily, most of our friends tend to drink to excess only in their own or our living rooms, and are pretty good about designated drivers. My only worry was for the handful of teen to twenty-somethings that we will have as guests. We are instructing the bartender that anybody who looks as if they are less than 30 is not to be served without the explicit permission of their parents, and I hope that will take care of any potential problems. We do have a couple of guests who are actually 21 or 22, but those instructions should also ensure that their parents keep an eye on their level of consumption.
We’re doing similar handouts saying “Please be responsible in getting yourself home” with the numbers of 4 cab companies on it - my mom was even saying she might “pass them out” to guests who look like they need it.
I may also send an email to our friend guest list once the RSVPs come in advising them to think about their transportation options from the hotel to the reception - just so no one is caught offguard.
This is precisely why we are having our wedding in the same hotel where guests are staying. As much as I really wanted to have a wedding somewhere more unique, when it came down to it, I had just been on stretch of 4 weddings I attended which weren’t held particularly close to the hotel, and I got stuck as the designated driver each time, and frankly, it sucked. I wanted to ensure that ALL guests were able to have fun, so we sucked it up and decided to have our wedding in the hotel, so everyone just needs to be able to get in the elevator and remember the floor number!
I cannot tell you the number of guests who have called me just to say how glad they are that we have everything under one roof and that they can just park the car when they get there and not have to worry about moving it or figuring out public transportation. As disappointed as I was at first, all the thanks makes me really glad that I decided to go this route!
Great idea! As someone who works in a program trying to reduce the amount of drinking and driving, I worry about people not being responsible drinkers and drivers. I am hoping more people decide to stay at our hotel (and wedding site) if they have too much to drink.
I think that we are going to print out business cards on VistaPrint with the names and numbers of cab companies and have them on the bar. That way when people are getting their 8th beer, that little card will be right there.
Im renting busses. There is no way I’d have a wedding in an out of the way location and do it any other way. I’m spending 1/3 of what I wanted to spend on flowers in order to budget money for busses.
We did buses too. I think that this is a very important detail. The guests will really appreciate it and will have a much better time knowing that they do not have to worry about finding transportation.
Great idea… maybe we’ll go the vistaprint route too! =)
I am also providing buses. Our venue (ceremony and reception is in the same place) is up a windy mountain road with a portion unpaved. I just didn’t like the idea of anyone driving home on that road after indulging in an open bar. It’s WAY more than I wanted to spend, but I feel like our peace of mind is worth it.
You can look into renting a taxi for an hour or two. We do this at school when we have formals — the student government hires two taxis for two hours at the end of the night, and there’s a pre-agreement that you can take the taxis anywhere within an x-mile radius for free. It’s not that expensive to rent a taxi by the hour. We’re probably going to do that for our wedding, to get the guests back to the hotel after the reception. That way people can leave at different times if they want to, also.
i’m doing buses too, for the same reasons that penguin mentioned. they’re looping back and forth from the venue to the hotel throughout the night, so people can have fun and not feel like they’re stuck at the reception. i just feel responsible for my guests’ safety since we’re having an open bar.
good idea about the cards!! i didn’t really think about that! we are planning, though, to tell the dj and bartenders to announce “last call” about an hour before the reception ends so that hopefully people will continue dancing and sobering up if they were drinking a lot. this will hopefully ensure that everyone makes it home safely and it will also save a little money on the alcohol bill! 
i’m very lucky in that my actual reception is within walking distance of both hotels we are reserving blocks in (and a few others). but for the welcome party, which is just outside out of downtown atlanta, we are going to reserve a bus. these cards are a great idea if you aren’t able to do that though!
My DOC will be downstairs for the last bits of the evening, calling cabs for people as they come down to leave, should they need them; but I do also like the idea of a little card. I’m happy about that - I’m at Cafe Brauer too and didn’t know how that would work.
PS - Miss Peacock, don’t know if you watch Top Chef, but the commercial for tomorrow’s episode shows them at the LP Zoo and there is a scene where you can clearly see them doing something inside Brauer!
These are all great ideas! We have very few out of town guests (few at the hotel, too), so everyone will be going to different places at the same time. I think it would be too hard to coordinate renting something. Chicago has a million cabs so I hope that the cards will work.
SRC- I don’t get Bravo! I heard that they were at Uno’s for the first episode and I would have loved to see the inside of that kitchen! I have such a crush on Cafe Brauer. Maybe I can watch some of the videos online. Thanks for the heads up!
@Miss Peacock:
Eh, you didn’t miss anything, they weren’t actually in the Uno kitchen. They KIND of played it off like they were just walking back into the Uno kitchen, but they didn’t really attempt to hide the fact that it was obviously just the set of the kitchen they’re using for the season, wherever that is. Not sure why they bothered even pretending they were walking back there when they weren’t going to remotely pretend it was Uno once they got in it. Alas…
