As a self-professed Disney fanatic, I had the perfect proposal (for me). We were vacationing at Walt Disney World (my favorite place in the whole world) and my fiancé proposed under the fireworks at Cinderella’s castle in Magic Kingdom. It was everything that I could have hoped for.Evidently friends and family knew that that night was ‘the’ night, so they were all anxiously waiting for the news on social media. The questions were immediate: When are you getting married? Where are you getting married? How is the wedding planning coming along? We had a long engagement, so I truly lost count of how many times people asked about the wedding plans. I should be used to this, right? I literally plan events for a living.
So we started considering our options. I will be honest, as a Special Events Manager, I kinda wanted to elope. The notion of just bringing along a few people to share in that truly intimate moment really sounded nice. We could travel some place, make it into a vacation for everyone. Heck! We could even do it at Walt Disney World!! All of those details that I have to work through for my clients, I could just push wedding planning to someone else to handle! It truly was tempting.
But eloping wasn’t in the cards for us. We had too many people that ‘had’ to be there, so we started looking at options near where we lived. Luckily, I know a lot of really good people in the industry, so I definitely had a home field advantage. As I always tell my clients, find the venue first, and everything else will fall into place. So that is where we started.
We looked at all of the places that I had worked before. They were all beautiful in different aspects, but something still wasn’t clicking. Eventually we found our venue: Camp Buckhorn at Paris Mountain State Park. We knew we wanted the fall, but we wanted some time to save up to afford everything. There was plans to pay for everything ourselves (which we mostly did, but thank you to the parents that chipped in!), so we had to time out all of our normal living expenses and the cost of the wedding. Actually we had to wait a little bit to actually book our venue (government ran, specific rules), so we had a bit more time than what we had originally anticipated.