Once we decided that we wanted to get married in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I put my supreme Googling skills to work. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to visit any venues for several months, but I wanted to have a good idea of what was available. Plus, we knew that when we visited, we would only have a day or two at the most to visit places. So we wanted to have it narrowed down to our favorites.
As I mentioned before, our first priority was having a ceremony with a beautiful view, like this:
Image by Tall + Small Photography
We kind of figured that if we’re going to have a destination wedding, it needs to have something that neither of our home towns could offer. I started doing Google image searches on “Blue Ridge Mountain Weddings.” And wow, there are so many jaw-droppingly gorgeous venues in the mountains.
While I was in San Francisco recently for training, some of the locals showed us around the city to see some of the sights, and we rode on a super cute retro street car to the Embarcadero for dinner and drinks. I remembered reading about some weddings in San Francisco where the bride and groom commission a street car or cable car to transport their guests from the ceremony to the reception. How fun does that sound?!
An old trolley car used in a San Francisco wedding…how fun!! Photo by Leo Patrone / Image via Snippet & Ink.
We don’t really have that kind of public transportation option in Houston. Also, our ceremony will be held at the same place as our reception, so we don’t need transportation for all of our guests. That did get me thinking about the Wallaby getaway vehicle, though.
The thing is, we don’t really have a getaway vehicle. Not a fancy rental car or borrowed vintage car or anything like that. We didn’t have room in the budget to rent any kind of vehicle, so we nixed that idea. We also thought about riding away on a tandem bike—Mr. Wallaby and I have ridden in several long-distance bike competitions together!—but our venue is about ten miles from our hotel, and I don’t think we can make it that far after all of the excitement of the wedding (and after a few glasses of champagne). So, we’ve decided to drive off in Mr. W’s car! I don’t have any pictures of it—he just bought it a month ago—but it’s a sporty new Kia Optima with some of the coolest features I’ve ever heard of (including air conditioned seats!). I know that car has lots of long road-trips, errands around town, date nights out, and all kinds of other trips in store for it, and since Mr. W bought it so close to the wedding, it’s really the new vehicle for our new little family.
The only thing left to do is leave the groomsmen with some instructions to decorate the car however they like. Of course, being a romantic old soul, I love simple old-fashioned getaway cars decorated like this:
Woooooo, just one more day until The Big Day! Let’s see, what do I have left to talk about…
Ah yes, The Somethings!
(Side note: if I’m ever in a band—as trampoline player, as I have no musical ability whatsoever, aside from good rhythm—we’re going to be called The Somethings. I like it. It’s catchy.)
Something Old
I’ve always interpreted “something old” in the poem to mean something you already own, not something that happens to have been made a long time ago, so my something old will be my faux pearl stud earrings I’ve owned for-like-ever, as seen at my epic bridal shower.
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| {photo by Mr. Potion} |
Something New
I’ve also always thought it’s sort of cheating to count your wedding dress as the “something new,” so my new object will be my new pair of shoes that I love so so much!
When it came to picking our flower girl and ring bearer, we mostly had to look to my side of the family. Mr. Manatee’s family’s children are either way too old, or way too young. The youngest girl is 12, and the most eligible boy in the family is only about year old. He did a pretty good job in his parents’ wedding a few months ago, but mainly because it required something he already wanted to do…walk towards his parents. I didn’t really ask my bridesmaids in any fancy way, but I did order this card from Arleen Design for the asking of our little ones!
So, for our ring bearer we chose my little cousin, Pierce, who lives in Vancouver with the rest of my extended family! We’ve had the privilege of hanging out several times on family trips, and he is always SO much fun!
So if you’ll remember where we left off, I had found a few bits and pieces to incorporate into our invitations, but nothing that I was completely in love with. With that in mind, I ventured on over to Pinterest, where I had been collecting ideas for…a really long time.
And just like that—there it was. The invitations that we would buy! They were unique, they had the wrap around labels, and while there were a few things I didn’t love, I thought I could work with the designer to change it up a little to further customize them for us.
Photo via Impressed Inc. / Invitation design by a friend of the bride
Now that cousin P (who’s the only guest I know reads this blog) has her invite, it’s time for the rest of you to see them.
Several months ago, while I was still under the delusion that I could DIY our invites, I got some nice brown paper to try some mock ups. Eventually I got lucky and on my July visit to the US, found some very nice printable invites from Gartner Studios at Target:
I snatched two packs of 50 (because we’re sending about 100 invites). It turned out that the invites are almost identical to the paper I had in mind:
weddingcrazy is selling a new Mary’s Bridal 5209 wedding gown in white. She is asking $329 for the size 8 gown.
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I posted a while ago that I was having second thoughts about my veil. I fell in love with lace-edged veils, and after some hemming and hawing, I decided to turn my plain veil into a showpiece. To accomplish this, I ordered a strip of lace trim off of Etsy.
To start, I cut the strip in half. In order to make one continuous strip of lace for the edge of my veil, I had to stitch the two pieces of trim together in the middle. I lined up the pattern on the lace and sewed it together with invisible thread.
Once I was primped, dressed, and equipped with my bee-adorned bouquet, it was time for our first look. As I walked around the house and saw Mr. Dalmatian standing in the field by the old red pickup truck, my heart was racing.
Even though we’ve already booked most of our “big” stuff, I think it’s helpful to reflect on how we actually came to our decisions. So, our first BIG decision was the venue. Because, obviously we couldn’t have a date without the venue.
Before we started looking, we talked about what was most important to us. We decided that our absolute number one priority was having a beautiful ceremony location.
Can I brag about my guy just a little bit here? I love him so much. When I asked him what was more important to him about our wedding, he said (without any prompting) he wanted to ceremony to be amazing. He said he doesn’t care if the reception is in a run down community center, but he wants the ceremony to be incredible. (Isn’t that sweet? He’s more romantic than me. It’s awesome.)
Clearly, I wasn’t opposed to having a spectacular ceremony, so the ceremony site became the focus of our search. Luckily for us, we had very similar visions of where we would like to get married. Neither of us wanted a church wedding (I have always sworn that I will not have green church carpet in my wedding photos!). And we love the idea of an outdoor wedding with a spectacular view. We both started dreaming about a fantastic wedding on a cliff overlooking the mountains or the ocean.
Image by Alex Schoenfelt
Dreamy groom’s attire. Photo via Etsy seller HandmadeByEmy.
Mr. Wallaby doesn’t get too many opportunities to dress up. He and I both work at petrochemical refineries, and we wears fire-resistant clothing (FRCs) to work every day. Here’s Mr. W in his work get-up:
I’m going to be totally honest here and tell you that our first dance was pretty awkward. We had done a brief practice at home during which we figured out a way to at least get onto the dance floor gracefully, but when we attempted it at the wedding, we had to tell everyone we were going to dance, hit play, then walk away so we could come back in, and everyone started yelling, “WHERE ARE YOU GUYS GOING?”
Mr. D tried to still do the intro but I panicked and stepped right into the high school shuffle, where I firmly stayed for the rest of the dance.
Note how Mr. Dragon is smiling and I’m doing all that I can to not look at the people staring at us.
Add to that the fact that my dress was improperly hemmed and was still too long, and there we were, spinning in tight circles, while I stepped all over my dress. I felt dizzy and flustered and on display, which made me really want everything to be done and over with. I guess I wasn’t quite finished with those nerves!
mglem89 and her fiance pose in a silly football position in their wedding-day gear.
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Despite the fact that Mr. Manatee had very clear intentions of being married in a church, he didn’t really have any specifications of which church. Spoiler alert: This was the first time his mother and I had ever actually butt heads over anything. She wanted us to get hitched in a gorgeous church in his hometown (Southlake) that they attended on occasion, and I had my eye on a church about two blocks down from our reception location. Both of these churches were Methodist, but that’s pretty much where the comparison stops. Always eager to keep the peace between Manatee-In-Law and I, I usually would have just agreed to use White Chapel. However.
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| SL White Chapel |
There were several roadblocks between us and wedded bliss at White Chapel.
1. The DFW Connector
It was time to get married! Brent made an announcement to please turn off cell phones as the ceremony was about to start! Singer J and the groomsmen accompanying him started the first song for our families entrance, “Candle on the Water.”
All Photos by Palos Studio
“I’ll be your candle on the water…”
We decided during our planning that we wanted all our family to walk down the aisle, including our siblings who were not in our bridal party. My brothers acted as ushers and Mr. Castle’s sister did a reading, and we wanted them all to be a part of the processional as well. It ended up working out very nicely. The first to enter was Mr. Castle’s grandmother, escorted by his nephew.
