Hello all,
I'm just now beginning to plan my April/May 2014 wedding. We want to hold our reception on my family farm. We're fortunate to have a headstart in many aspects. My family owns a restaurant/bakery, so our chefs will be handling all of the catering. The farm has multiple houses, and we'll be setting up the tent in between them giving our 150 guests access to many bathrooms. We have generators and won't have to worry about blowing circuits. We even have a large catering prep kitchen on the property. My Aunt is a florist and my almost Aunt (very close friend of the family and business partner) is a designer who has done parties for Oprah, Maya Angelou and other celebs. Basically, everything is set up perfectly, so naturally there has to be some major issue. The issue is that the farm is about an hour north of where the majority of our guests live, where our out of town guests will be staying and where the church ceremony will take place.
The farm is in a very rural area. The closest hotels are 20 minutes away (in the opposite direction of Charlotte). Since we're able to save so much money on other aspects of the wedding due to the fact that we're "in the industry" we were thinking of hiring shuttle busses to shuttle people from the church (in Charlotte) to the reception on the farm, and then offering 3 or 4 different return times. We have plenty of parking on the property so people would be welcome to drive if they wanted to. WWYD? Would you be turned off by having to travel so far? Would you appreciate having a shuttle available or is that just weird?
We're even considering setting up another semi-permanent tent type structure and having cots available for those adventurous souls who want to party until the sun comes up (sort of a tradition in my FI's home country) We'd have another shuttle leave the following day.
Thoughts/advice much appreciated! I'd really hate to have to move things to a venue that will limit us in time, food, etc. etc.
Lexi