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Weddingbee Blog
I know that title isn’t nearly as sophisticated as it should be, especially considering our venue.
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| Image via My Chicago Wedding |
The tasting was sophisticated and classy. But the food was so good, I just wanted to dance up and down and go, “mmmmmm, yummy.” In fact, I still do. So there you have it.
I don’t know where my camera is. I thought I’d left it at work and was kicking myself for not having it for the entire five days I was off (birthday celebration, woot!), but I’m back at work and still can’t find it. So all pics from here on will be taken on my super-cool new Blackberry that was a birthday gift to myself. I apologize in advance.
Mr. Kettle and I picked up Grandmother Kettle and drove out to Joliet for the tasting. There, we met Momma and Daddy Kettle, Mima and Poppa Kettle, and FSIL Grand. Yeah, we took eight people there. I tried to take pictures, but it was an afterthought.
This is the second installment of my little “Venue That Wasn’t” series. For this venue, I wanted to show you all Leila Arboretum. Seriously one of the most beautiful places in Battle Creek. In the spring, it is bursting with new flowers and green everywhere. In the summer the trees are lush and beautiful. If the fall it is a Midwestern dreamscape of orange, yellow, and blue, and in the winter it is a marshmallow magic land of rolling hills and sledding.
OK, enough yip-yapping! I will show you pictures!
When you come up the main drive, this is what greets you.
There are so many nice venues in South West Michigan, and I am really a sucker for “what-if-ing” So I thought I’d start my own little mini series for a number of reasons. 1) It may be helpful to other brides who are still in the midst of their venue hunt. 2) These little walks down “what-if lane” will help me re-affirm my venue choice. (Not that I need much re-affirming—I am very happy with both venues, I just thought it would be fun!)
So for this the first episode, I would like to introduce you to The Birch Gallery.
This beautiful place would FOR SURE be where we would get married if: we could have a Catholic wedding outside, we were getting married in the fall, when the weather is a bit more predictable than April, and if the majority of ours guests were not from out of state (read: need hotels), and we weren’t having 200 guests (give or take 50). Alas, all of those things are part of our wedding reality, and for that reason, we will not be getting married here.
To recap, we had struck out with our initial venue search, but I then discovered an appreciation for all-inclusive packages that opened up a few more options for us.
Among these options was a little place called Historic Cedarwood.
Image via Cedarwood Weddings / Photo by Left Turn Photo
How did I feel when we found Cedarwood? This sums it up pretty well:
“You know the feeling when it’s the bottom of the ninth, the bases are loaded, and you know the next one’s coming right down the middle. And then, you just connect…and for an instant, you know that it’s going over the fence and out of the park…and further than you could ever imagine.” - Steve Guttenberg, It Takes Two
Featured on Weddingbee
All-Inclusion Invitation Suites
“Make an elegant invitation statement without the fuss. Stylish invitation sets with matching envelopes, reception and response cards included.”
The future in-laws were in town for the weekend at the end of March, and there was talk about showing them our venue after I got off work that Sunday.
I was all for this plan, as the only time we have been to our venue was the previous June (2010), when we initially toured it and met with the DOC. I figured this would be the perfect chance to reassure myself that I indeed love the place (hey, booking two years out leaves a lot of time for reconsidering!) and to poke around town a bit to find good picture-taking locales!
First off, I don’t have a personal picture of this (bad blogger), but remember how there are three houses that are a part of the Vandiver?
Images via Vandiver Inn
Well, the Vandiver Mansion was/is greener than it looks in the photo there, but the other houses were definitely white when we first visited last year. Totally fine, whatever, no biggie…I guess they didn’t really look like they were all a part of the same “complex,” but I wasn’t worried.
When I began my seemingly endless search for venues, there was one phrase that made my nose turn up and brought a bitter taste to my mouth. What was the dreaded phrase, you ask?
Personal image
I was with filled a desire to hand-make table decor and dig through flea-market booths. I was looking forward to contacting every vendor who would talk to me and finding people that would make our wedding truly unique, truly ours. At the beginning, I thought the phrase “all-inclusive” was going to eliminate all of this.
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
No, our venue search did not involve baseball fields, but the White Sox fan in me just had to throw in (pun very much intended) some baseball references!
Personal photo from the last game I went to—Go Sox!
After countless online searches, numerous email inquiries, and a few phone calls (I hate calling strangers, but it turns out wedding planning requires quite a bit of that), we were ready to visit some venues!
I had actually been to a couple of potential wedding sites as an overanxious girlfriend, but it was way more exciting to be going as an actual bride-to-be! While Mr. Dalmatian wasn’t quite as outwardly giddy as I was, I think he enjoyed it, too. And he didn’t give me too much crap about the fact that I failed to consider the venues’ locations when arranging visits and the order I had us seeing them in could not have been any less convenient—my bad!
As much as I would like to pretend I was more on top of things, I didn’t have a written or even mental checklist at the time, but these were our unspoken priorities:
Like many brides, as soon as we got engaged I was ready to dive head first into wedding planning. For me, the first task at hand was finding the ideal venue, and finding the ideal venue meant one thing—a barn! Let me give you a little background so that you understand where I am coming from.
When I was little, my dream was to move to Wisconsin and live on a farm. My family and I spent every summer at our grandparents’ house in Door County, Wsiconsin, and I was in love with the grazing horses, cornfields, and dairy farms that passed by my window as we drove through rural America.
Personal photo from THE Farm (basically a giant petting zoo with lots of rural charm)
My saga of finding a wedding venue had a little bit of a rough start. Lucky for me (and Mr. A) it has a very happy ending. I was fortunate enough to have two great priests growing up. One was a fairly young man who was a fantastic speaker, highly intellectual, and very friendly. All of the little old ladies in our parish called him “Father What-a-Waste” because, on top of everything I just mentioned, he was pretty decent looking. All of that aside, he transferred to a much bigger parish when I was in high school and I figured that was that.
Fast forward to the weekend after the “Seven-Minute Meeting,” as it had come to be known, and Mr. Aardvark and I are enjoying time with my family. My step-mother gets an email informing us that “Fr. What-a-Waste” is returning to my hometown of Battle Creek!
This was great news and in a few short (OK, they felt like millennia) weeks I was talking to him (on the phone and via email!) about how to schedule our wedding date. He was kind enough to FAX some paperwork to our local priest, and just like that we had our location, ceremony time, and date set! It was really a dream come true.
Now, the church is not at all the small, quaint building I had envisioned in plan A. It is a beautiful, large, old, traditional Catholic church. Would you like to see?
Photo via St. Philip’s website
The wedding-venue hunt, or WVH for short, can be one of the hardest parts of planning. For many brides there are SO many options they become overwhelmed with the pros and cons of all of them. Lucky for me, I am not one of those brides. Both Mr. Aardvark and I are Catholic. That did a lot of venue limiting for us. We knew we wanted the ceremony in a church. However, being relatively new to Wisconsin and having family and friends all over God’s green earth, we were not sure which city or even which state would be the best place for us to tie the knot.
After a little bit of discussion, we decided that my home state of Michigan would be best. If you are not familiar with the shape of this lovely state, it looks like this:
Image via Google Maps
I don’t really need a big lead-in to this because you can just look at my hover cloud/bio thingy and see that we’re getting married at the Vandiver. Kind of ruins the surprise, doesn’t it?
Anyhoot, I had been looking at the Vandiver Inn for a while. A few things let me know right away that this place could very well be our wedding venue:
1. Fantastic reviews on Weddingbee and Wedding Wire. Check.
2. Their website has a whole section dedicated to weddings…with basic price points listed. Chhhheck! This hardly EVER happens, at least with most of the venues I was researching. There’s usually a fun game where you email or call and wait for a response back that can take days or weeks, and I’m an antsy pants. One place I looked at didn’t respond for five months…what?!
4. Those price points listed? Are totally in our budget. BIG CHECK.
3. The day-of coordinator (herein referred to as DOC) answered my email and called within 48 hours. Check check check.
4. It’s located in Maryland, on an inlet that leads to the bay. This means water. Lots of water…and having grown up 10 minutes from the beach, I’m a total sucker for that. :)))Check times 10.
For some brides, finding a venue is among one of the most difficult tasks. Luckily for me, it was easy and joyful. ONE WEEK after we were engaged (which happened to be New Year’s Eve), both of us, along with our parents had two appointments to go look at venues. The previous week I had scoured every Northern California wedding venue that existed. We knew we wanted an outside venue, but we did not rule anything out. Therefore I had looked online at an array of venues: ballrooms, ranches, vineyards, hotels. Some were just too pricey…and some trucked in port-a-potties for bathrooms, which was not my thang. Well, actually, when discovering some outrageous venue prices, I started to consider the port-a-potty option. That was until my mom brought me back to reality…as usual. After much research and reviewing many wedding packages, I had narrowed it down to two potential venues.
Our first stop of the day was at a winery near Coloma, CA in the Gold Country. First off, our GPS did not even know how to get there, and we had no cell phone service.
Read more…
By this point you may be thinking, “Miss Aardvark! We loved your cute stories about budding love, but this is not a biography! You said you were going to be talking about your wedding!” And you are right! Let’s take a break from all the “getting to know you” niceties and talk about the main event (or at least the kickoff to the main event, the wedding—the real main event being the marriage, of course).
When Mr. Aardvark and I first got engaged, and perhaps a little before that, we knew we wanted an inexpensive, simple wedding with our nearest and dearest around us. This is not what we had in mind:
The most work I think I’ve done on this whole entire shindig had to be the weeks I spent looking for an appropriate place to house everyone the weekend of the wedding. While my parents do have a nice cabin within 10 minutes of the venue, the two bedrooms weren’t going to cut it.
Photo from my mom of my parents’ cabin
On the way home to the city, we stopped at one of my favorite places from my interwebs search. Riverdale Manor, also in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is a converted farmhouse with an attached ballroom and pavilion. As we drove up I was unsure of the sketchy road: leading up to the venue is just old shack-like buildings and abandoned trailers. However, as we got to the clearing it was like stepping into another world. The property itself is perched right beside the Susquehanna River, and is as purty as a cupcake.
Image via Riverdale Manor / Photo by The Weinbers
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