28 NovThe Plan

In the process of planning my wedding I have discovered that I am very unlike a lot of young brides-to-be, in that I was not born with the bride gene that gives girls the ability to plan their ceremony from the time they acquire the basics of language. Both my fiancé and I were admittedly dense about the wedding industry in the Grey-Bruce area when we first began to plan the big day, and we didn’t really know where to start. We decided the best thing to do was to choose a venue that we loved and use it as the basis around which we would plan the rest of the ceremony.

Originally we didn’t even know if we were getting married in the Grey-Bruce area. I was initially in love with the idea of a destination wedding at a resort where they plan everything and all I have to do is show up in a beach-y white summer dress. Although this seemed like it would be easy and fun, we had to evaluate what was truly essential for our big day. Having the elderly members of our families there was very important to us, and we decided that they probably wouldn’t make the trip to Hawaii or Mexico. However, we could still plan a beautiful outdoor wedding right here at home.

The appeal of a destination wedding was partially in that the ceremony and the reception would be at the same venue, which would save time, money, and effort in planning. We saw an ad online for a beautiful inn in the area that could host an outdoor ceremony by a waterfall and then cater our reception in their banquet room. It seemed perfect, so we went to go have a look.

At first sight we loved the inn and the grounds, but we couldn’t envision where our ceremony would be and what it would look like. We were going abandon the inn right there until we happened to bump into the manager, who took us on a little tour, explained all the options with our ceremony and pointed out the beauty spots. She also let us know about their Sunday brunch package, with the ceremony in the morning followed by brunch catered by the inn. We loved it and reserved our date almost instantly. We were even able to book a small stone church just up the lane in case of bad weather. Now my family has reserved rooms at the inn as well and we are all excited about our “local destination wedding.”

By: Beth Curley