Weddingbee Blog

Whew! I’ve finally caught y’all up on all the things we got accomplished during our wedding planning trip to Dallas. Seriously…we got a ton done in the course of five days. Let’s review, shall we?

• We hung out with friends.
• We took engagement pictures.
• We met with our officiant and made a decision about the first look.
• We booked a DJ.
• We tasted cakes and finalized our cake design.
• We finalized our reception rentals and layout.
• I met with our florist and finalized our flower order.
• We decided what the guys would wear.
• I had my hair trail and made a decision about my veil.
• I tried on the sample of my dress and fell in love with it again.

Aren’t you exhausted for us?

Now, I know that there are tons of bees planning their weddings across much longer distances than we are (I don’t know how you do it, Meerkat!), but I’ve had a couple of LDBs (Long Distance Brides…or Long Distance Bees!) reach out to me with concerns about getting everything they needed to get done in just a couple of trips to their wedding cities, so I thought I’d share some tips that helped make our planning trip super successful, pretty fun, and not stressful at all. Here goes:

• Do Your Homework: When you’re planning from long distance, you have to maximize your time in your wedding city, which means you have to do a ton of work on the front end so that you aren’t wasting any time once you’re there. My advice is to find out as much as you can in advance about the vendors you will meet with. I had several vendors who only wanted to talk price in person, but that’s just not an option when you’re planning from afar. There’s no point in meeting with a vendor only to find out that they are out of your price range. Negotiate pricing with vendors in advance, and save the in person appointments for things you absolutely can’t work through over the phone or email—like determining if a vendor’s personality meshes with yours and seeing products in person.

• Build a Trip Itinerary: I treated our wedding planning trip just like I would any work event in another city—with a complete itinerary. I put together this spreadsheet in Excel, including our appointment date, time and location, as well as the contact info for the person we would be meeting with. I also made a notes column so I could hand write in anything from the vendor meetings that I needed to. I made sure to leave travel time in between appointments too, so we weren’t rushing around or stressed out about making it to appointments on time. Having everything planned out in advance was crucial to getting everything checked off our to do list.

• Figure Out Who Goes On What Appointments: OK, let’s be honest. Not all the wedding appointments are…how do I say it?…guy friendly. For example, I knew that King Hippo could really care less about flowers. Having him sit and listen to a discussion about flowers would not only be painful for him, but it would definitely make the experience less-than-enjoyable for me, too. Don’t get me wrong, I love spending time with King Hippo, but he is not so fun to be around when he’s bored and restless. Discussion on boutonnieres = bored and restless, so I planned the appointments that I needed him to be at with me (cake tasting, officiant, ceremony space, etc.) early in the week so that he could spend time with his parents later in the week while I did the other less guy friendly appointments (florist, hair appointment, dress shop) with one of my BMs. It was a perfect plan! Another option would be to divide and conquer so that you are at some appointments together, but then do others separately. For example, he picks out a tux while you pick out flowers.

• Schedule In Some Down Time: While we wedding obsessed brides can talk wedding all day long, not everyone (King Hippo especially) feels the same way. Make sure you have time built in either between appointments or before or after your day’s meetings to just hang out. For us, this meant filling up on Tex Mex (oh, how I’ve missed you!) and cervezas over lunch or hanging out with friends over dinner. Taking some time away from all things wedding helped us enjoy our time together and remember why we were doing all of this work in the first place.

Good luck LDBs! Any other helpful tips I’ve left out?