You are where now?

As I was saying last week, our circle of people that we want at our wedding comes out to a smallish 45. Quite a manageable number we though and we expect that the vast majority of those on our guest list would want to actually show up on our Day. So we started working with Susan to find a venue for our wedding that would nicely accommodate 40 people or so.

Seems easy? Not so much.

Apparently, the wedding industry does not see 40-45 people as a “valid” number for a wedding. We’ve looked at restaurants, hotels, golf clubs, wedding factory places, and in all cases, we’ve pretty much struck out. We’re too big for the smaller venues like B&Bs and most country inns, and we’re too small for hotels, country clubs and yes even the wedding factories. Our wedding group apparently exists in a black hole between “small” (which is translated to be under 30 people) and “medium” which is 50-65 people.

Granted, if we’re willing to pay $200+ per person, we can find a few beautiful spots, but even then they would take us grudgingly due to our “small” size.

Who knew?

Now what was also throwing it off was the time of year. You have probably heard the same thing we did about the traditional wedding season being May to September, perhaps creeping into October. So we figured that our 2nd time revised date in November would make it easy. Again, not so much. Because we couldn’t have an outdoor ceremony at that time of year, it made it quite problematic to find a venue that would host both ceremony and reception. Churches are out for us and that doesn’t leave much else in terms of ceremony locales.

So here we are, not much closer to a wedding venue than we were when we first started looking in July.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel of darkness though. We found out a month ago that most of MM’s friends would be deploying while he is away or just after he gets back. Because it is very important to both of us to have them there, we’ve chosen to delay. Again.

New date? May 15, 2010.

So now we can go back and relook at places that would be mainly outdoors. At least for the ceremony.

Stay tuned! :-)