And the wedding planning begins! After we decided on October 2011 for our wedding and figured out our budget, the search for the venue began. Since we live in Atlanta and our families are both long distance, we had some decisions to make. It was an easy decision for us to have the wedding in Georgia, since it would make things a lot easier to plan. So, we started off by just searching online and requesting quotes from places. When we first started looking at venues we had a lot of criteria. We have a lot of guests coming from out of town so we wanted a place that either had lodging, or had lodging nearby with a shuttle. We also wanted a place that would be as all-inclusive as possible because we're both in school and don't have a lot of time. We definitely wanted an outdoor ceremony near water, in a garden, etc.
So, the first place we loved was Chota Falls. It's up in the Georgia mountains and the outdoor venue allows you to get married in front of a waterfall. So. cool.
The other cool thing about this venue is that they have a whole weekend experience for your guests. There is housing for the guests and a lot of them can stay on the property. Your wedding takes up this whole "resort" venue for one whole weekend. We were sold. It had all of our criteria and was gorgeous, at least from the pictures. Their package included housing for 40 guests along with a lot of the wedding details. So I set out trying to get an appointment to go see the place. Unfortunately, their customer service leads a lot to be desired. I put in a request on their website, called them, and emailed their coordinator personally and it still took them 2 1/2 weeks to send me a very generic email containing little information, and none of it was personalized to the questions I had asked. On the phone, they told met they'd have details out to me by the end of the day, and the only response I got was to the email I sent 2 days later when I hadn't received anything. And that still took 2 weeks. Clearly, we wanted to go with a place that was more on their game. After all, if I can't get in touch with them now, how's it going to be once we are actually planning the wedding? Once I finally did get pricing and information from them we had to scrap this place anyway. All of those great things that fit into our criteria cost money. Lots of it.
The next place we actually visited is up in the GA mountains as well. It's called Forrest Hills and the thing we really liked about this place was that they had group housing and cabins for our guests to stay in. Criteria number one, check. When we went there for a tour, the place had been taken over by a fraternity the whole weekend and the housing was COMPLETLEY trashed. There was garbage all over the place, furniture was broken, the works. Whatever you are imagining it looking like, multiply it by 4 and it might come close to what we walked in on. But still, we were able to look past the trash and see that it really was a nice place. All of the little cabins had hot tubs and the group housing had a shared hot tub between 6-8 rooms. It'd be perfect for all of us to stay together, eat breakfast together, and hang out outside of the wedding time. I've heard that it's really hard to see all of your guests at the wedding so this would be perfect for us to have time outside of those few hours with our loved ones.
Then we went into the ceremony and reception spaces. The outdoor ceremony area was nice. But it wasn't exactly what we wanted. And the reception area... I loved the dance floor and the view from the patio. But the whole place kind of felt like a wilderness lodge. Which is probably the feel they were going for, but not exactly what we wanted for the wedding.
We actually almost signed here because we loved the housing so much, but decided that it was too far away from Atlanta. Our guests would be flying into the Atlanta airport and would then have to travel 2 1/2 hours to get to our venue. Not ideal. So, at this point we decided to focus our attention on places that were in and around Atlanta. We'd have more hotel options and guests who were flying in wouldn't have to travel as far to get to the venue. So, stay tuned for the next edition of our hunt for the perfect venue!
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