Love. Live. Laugh. Wed.

or as I'd rather title this "You have got to be kidding me!!"

A few weeks ago I was chatting on the Weddingbee boards with local NY brides about their wedding locations and my venue searching woes. One nice Rochestarian mentioned that she was getting married at the White House in Webster Park. Intrigued, I looked it up. It turned out to be a gorgeous (white) house on a bluff overlooking the lake with tons of trees and gorgeous scenery. My first thought? "ohmygosh I love it!"

It was in a public park so the  rental fee was reasonable, they allowed alcohol, we could put up a tent, it had nearby hotel accomodations and we could pick our own caterer. It sounded perfect. I took Sean up there that very night to look around and he agreed that it was pretty perfect for what we were looking for. We reserved it that night for August 13th of next year and got all kinds of excited. We let family know that we'd (finally) picked a date and a venue and then everyone else got excited too.

Before we paid the rental fees I wanted to call and ask the Parks Department a few questions, and it turns out it's a good thing I did. Everything was going fine until I casually mentioned that we were going to be having about 200 guests. This is the conversation that followed:

Parks Lady: 200? That lodge only holds 100.
Me: Yes, I realize that. That's why we wanted the tent, we are going to have everything outside. The lodge will only be for the caterers and for bathroom use.
Parks Lady: Yes but that lodge can only hold 100 people. It's fire code.
Me: Yes, again, I realize that. But there is not a single point in time that we are planning to have everyone in that lodge. Everything will be outside in the tent.
Parks Lady: Yeah but if the weather gets bad everyone will try to run in to the lodge.
Me:  *in my head* Are you kidding me lady?!

Then she goes on to say she needs to get us special permission and we'll have to rent this other lodge too for overflow parking and blah blah blah blah blah... She'll get back to us the next day.

From the moment I hung up that phone I had a sinking feeling that this was going to go South quickly. Sure enough she called back the next day to say they would only let us have 150 at the most and we'd have to do all this other stuff to even have that many.

I was crushed. It wasn't even really about the venue. I mean, we really did like it and I think we could have had an awesome wedding there. But it was really about just finding a venue and setting a date and moving the eff on!

So now, we're continuing on with our search in the Binghamton area. It's a lot closer to where our family and friends live so it will be easier on them. It would have been a lot of traveling and expense for our guests since every single one of them would have been out of towners in Rochester.

So if you know of an awesome outside venue in Binghamton for a reasonable amount of money, send it my way!