Figuring Out What We Want: a journey of self-discovery, whining, and bees

When it comes to planning a wedding, I'm beginning to discover that while most people do it in a year or less, there are things that can (and will) occupy your time no matter how long your engagement. Especially if you, like me, never spent any time as a younger person thinking about what sort of spectacle you want your wedding to become. So when Josh and I gleefully, nervously, blindly stepped into the world of Almost Grown Up People we had rather a large job set up for us already, despite our carefully planned (massive) engagement period.

Before you can plan all of the little wiggly bits of a wedding (centerpieces, pennies in your shoe, cufflinks, etc) you need to have some kind of idea of what on earth you'd like to do. And this is where the venue comes in.

Before wedding planning I rarely, if ever, thought about the word "venue." My mother used to be employed at a rather large tourist attraction with a splendidly overpriced event space, and our discussions about her job in that very specific category was perhaps the only time in living memory I have ever uttered the word. Until now. The venue is so important, so central, so all-encompassing in the course of wedding planning that you apparently cannot make one single bloody decision until you figure out where to throw the damn thing. Will it be outside? If it's inside, can we have candles? If it's outside, will we have to rent porta-potties? Will we need to rent a tent? Where will the chairs be coming from? Do they allow outside caterers? Wait, did we even budget for catering?

Et freaking cetera.

One thing we did know is that we wouldn't be having our wedding in a church. Neither Josh The Fiance nor I have a home church, for one. Additionally, the ceremony will be (if it includes faith at all) alarmingly inter-faith. I came from a hippie presbyterian background and am now, with the help of college courses in Comparative Religion and an unfortunate bout of religious relativism, mired in floundering agnosticism. Josh The Fiance was raised Jewish/Native American Pagan, and now generally enjoys the idea of God but mostly thinks about cooking and computers. Our best church option would probably to be married in some kind of Unitarian commune, the kind where everybody wears hemp and brings a set of miniature set of bongos for the round singalong.

Another obstacle in our wedding planning is our debilitating lack of cash. Do you have any bloody idea how bloody expensive every bloody venue is out there in the world? Apparently the average cost for American weddings these days is something like $27,000. HOLY MACKEREL. ON A STICK. AND OTHER VARIOUS EXCLAMATIONS. That is more money than my dream car costs. Our budget cuts out most private estates, most hotel ballrooms, pretty much anywhere that requires that you hire their in-house catering service, and... that's pretty much that.

But we needed to figure out what sort of setting we wanted for our wedding, and we wanted it to be outside, in a pretty place, preferably somewhere that was close to most of our relatives, especially the ones who found travelling long distances difficult. That meant somewhere in Oregon or close to the Washington-Oregon border. (Josh and I live in the Seattle area, for those of you following along at home.)

And so the adventure began. Working from our computers, poking around in areas we were at best unfamiliar with, we started the Great Venue Search.