Wedding Blog

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When we first started the planning process, our first check mark on “the big list” was to find someone who could just help us out. Planning from over a thousand miles away can be difficult alone, but we knew if we had someone to ease the load it would make a huge difference. Brides usually seek the help of family friends or their dear mom, but our situation is a bit different.

My mom is a total tomboy, and although I love her and trust her dearly, we just knew we needed a little extra help for our wedding. We weren’t exactly sure what we wanted from a coordinator when we started the hunt, but we knew we wanted to be able to be honest about our expectations for the big day.

We knew what we didn’t want: a J.Lo ala “The Wedding Planner” type, feeding the best man his toast’s lines during the reception and possibly even planning a little more with Champ. At first we thought we might find a coordinator who would see what little “vision” we had for our wedding and would run with it on his or her own. Looking back on that thought now, we can’t believe we were so silly! After all, our engagement period has been over a year and a half long! It’s not like we were in a hurry to get things done. We had so much time to explore our own creativity!

Once we started brainstorming, the ideas just kept flowing. First it was to be a sophisticated black and white affair, and then it quickly morphed into a backyard barbecue. Somehow I had to get my dueling personalities to meet in the middle. Mr. Champagne and I have always known that our wedding was to be a celebration of our love, above all. So we wanted a coordinator who would know that while we wanted to be surrounded by elegant details, we still wanted to be able to be completely silly. After some interviews and long phone calls, we decided to hire a DOC who I happen to have known forever. JoAnn Moore of Mountains and Meadows Events in Vail is actually my old ballet teacher from way back when. She has pretty extensive experience with our venue, and the fit was definitely there. We loved her attention to detail, and we knew she would be able to keep things under control so we could really enjoy the day.

JoAnn is a master of simple elegance, which is exactly how we pictured the day. Because she has planned so many events in our venue, I was able to see how the space could be transformed.

A possible welcome table:

Winter wonderland:

And because JoAnn is my old ballet teacher, she’s seen me at my best. Nice mullet huh? I was a FOX.

Are we the only ones who started out wanting to be back-seat planners and morphed into having full-force obsessions with wedding details?