If you heard any of our early ideas for wedding venues and locations, you might be wondering what ever happened to Key West. We’d thought about getting married there for as long as we’d thought about getting married (well, either there or Puerto Rico … but Key West was the first choice).
In the beginning, we thought we’d have a really small wedding. That’s because we didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about what the term small wedding meant. So, of course we could easily pull off a destination wedding in a place like Key West. But when we realized that destination weddings are either really really small - like 12 people - or really really expensive - like fancy hotels - we had to re-consider. Well, that’s true at least for Key West.
First we made a list of who we wanted there. There’s a lot of you suckers, it turns out. Our first list had 76 people on it and there were others it made us sad not to write down. The places we liked best in Key West could hold 40 people max! The properties big enough for our group were super expensive. One small hotel (8 or 10 rooms maybe - but with a big outdoor event space) told us that first we would rent out the whole property for $20,000 and THEN we’d pick our catering and bar packages, decor, music, linens and so on. Uh, no.
Plus, being so far away from home made my whole idea of DIY wedding a little harder.
The cost for guests would be crazy, too. If we had the wedding in March or April, we were looking at room rates of $300 or more at some of those hotels big enough to accommodate us.
When we started looking closer to home we realized that my hometown also is a beach and also allows our guests to have a little getaway. It’s not Key West - it’s not even CLOSE to Key West (physically or conceptually), but there is ocean and bay and sand and pretty sunsets and a lot of things important to us. And we could invite more of you.
As of 5 p.m. Thursday, I STILL haven’t heard from the caterer so we’re not ruling out eloping yet … but he claims we’ll have some menu samples and costs by the end of the week so you might get to see our vows after all.