Boring Post-Wedding Blog Post #1: The Where's

And thus - let the blogging about my wedding last weekend begin!

When we first decided to get married, we had zero idea of where we wanted to do it. Our favorite bar? Too small. Our local supercute restaurant? Also too small. An old mansion? The zoo? The list was endless, though the prices/capacity SUPER varied.

Plus I was having trouble with the triple threat that hits you in the face immediately upon planning a wedding - which comes first: The date, the venue, or the guest list? You can't have a date if you don't know if a venue will be free on a particular date. You can't choose a venue until you know how many people you're inviting ... and how the hell can you invite anyone when you don't know when you're going to have it??

I was stuck at this, the very initial phase of planning, until my photographer friend Amanda mentioned this super cute outdoor venue we could consider:

. . . RIGHT?? Cute, oozingly RUSTIC (which in this case wasn't a keyword for "crap" like Emily Gilmore thinks), and most importantly available in the fall AND customizable to however many people you wanted. SOLD. Plus we could have it all weekend, and since we'd chosen Saturday, November 1st as our wedding date - that only meant one thing - HALLOWEEN PRE-PARTY BOO YAH.

Hemlock Farm is the name of this amazing place, which comes complete with a faux barn-hotel-B&B-thingie attached that you can rent out just for some fun, beautiful vacay's close to downtown Annapolis. It's gorgeous, and the owner Jen not only designed it but has a KA-BILLION ideas on how to change/alter/design it some more for whatever you want. When we rolled in Friday afternoon with our cars weighed down with empty wine bottles, wheat, and drawings (more on the decor in a post to come!) she already had a fun set of lanterns, tree stumps, and gourds for us to play with if we wished. Available gourds!

Which you can make the most of, by posing awkwardly in front of everything!

(all photos credit: Matt Hollis)

And no, we hadn't yet considered what a wedding outdoors in November in Maryland (Maryland Weather is a crafty creature who combines humidity + frost + CRAZY WIND TUNNELS to keep us all looking wind-blown and moist and unprepared for anything) would be like, nor how many other things (tables, tents, bathrooms, food, etc) we'd have to find with an outdoor venue. More on that in a later post on this, when the Boring Post-Wedding Blog Post RECAP series continues!

Up next ... DECOR!