On the Hunt...Our Ceremony Locale

After we finally set a date it was time to give some serious thought to our ceremony and reception venues.

In terms of ceremony locations, I would have loved to have an outdoor ceremony, but I am also practical and I knew that I didn't want to have worry about heat strokes, rain or any other uncontrollable craziness on our wedding day. Plus, both of our families are pretty religious and we just decided that having a church ceremony was the way to go. But figuring out the which church would be an ordeal all it's own. I never knew how much churches actually charge for what seems like such a short amount of time. I had a serious case of sticker shock. After I got past the price tags I was able to prioritize our choices to three.

1. His family has a church that they're been members of for many, many years, but it's too small and probably wouldn't accomodate everyone that was invited comfortably. 
2. My grandparents have a church which they have also been members of many years and many of the weddings for our family have taken place there in the past. 
3. Then there was another local church which my aunt was familiar with but we had no other ties.

We ruled out #1 for the obvious reason, #3 was ruled out based on the location (it was a little out the way considering all the various logistics of the wedding day). So we went with #2 and we'll be keeping the unofficial family wedding tradition going by having our ceremony at Fort Foote Baptist Church.

Personal photo from inside our ceremony venue

I was excited and apprehensive all at the same time after making this decision, for a couple of reasons:

• The contacts at the church weren't very responsive or helpful when I initially contacted them for information, and really just hard to get into contact with in general.
• The price still bugged me. But after actually being able to talk to someone I was able to get the price down from almost $900 to $525 (I mean really, we'll only be there for like an hour!). My first real round of negotiations, if you can call them that, were a success.

But I've been able to rationalize this decision in my head and now everything is good. We put down our deposit. I got an actual cellphone number for my main point of contact and I squared away all of our contract details.

Next up, our hunt for the perfect reception venue!