I recently attended a wedding that I wanted to share with
TK. It wasn’t a bad wedding really, but I wanted to share it because it was disorganized
and somewhat inconvenient for the guests. I thought it would provide some food
for thought for those brides/grooms still in the planning stages.
First, the timeline was misleading. The invitation and the
wedding website said the ceremony would be at 5PM. FI and I got to the venue
about a half hour early since I had googled it and saw that there were numerous
places where the ceremony could be held. When we arrived, the coordinator told
us that they were having cocktails before the ceremony. They would start
serving at 5:15 and they would start moving everyone to the ceremony space
around 5:45 for a 6PM start time.
Well, we didn’t even start heading to the ceremony until 6. Everyone was seated by 6:15 and we waited another 20 minutes in bright June
sunshine for the ceremony to start. After the ceremony (which was really very
lovely) we were moved up to the reception space shortly after 7. The bar was
opened and we waited about forty five minutes without food for the couple to
join us and then open the buffet (According to their website, the reception was
supposed to start at 6:45).
If you’re going to all the trouble to set up a website and
put information on it, make sure that it’s accurate! FI is in grad school and
he left class 2 hours early so we could make sure we were on time for the
ceremony. We were happy to do that, but if we had known that the ceremony was
an hour later he could have stayed for almost the entire class.
Also, everything was outdoors and there was a lot of walking
involved and that was never alluded to in any way prior to the wedding. There
were a lot of female guests in heels sinking into the ground and some elderly
guests that were having trouble with all the walking in the heat.
The ceremony itself was very nice, the food was great and
the dancing was fun. But it could have been so much better if it was better
organized and the guests had been better informed. And most importantly, I didn't get wedding cake until almost 10PM!
So knotties, what things make you say "The wedding was nice, but..."?