Wedding Venues Part II

After taking a breather and having a very LARGE glass, I mean bottle, of wine, I was back in the saddle!

I started scouring wedding blogs, wedding websites, and googling "affordable wedding venues in southern California." This really took some serious time. I figured there had to be a lot of people in my shoes that wanted a beautiful wedding with taste, but for a fraction of the cost. I found there are a ton of those people, however a lot of them gave in and drank the cool-aid! I stayed focused on the prize...

Things I knew:
 - I didn't care if it was an open bar with hard alcohol or just beer and wine
 - I did want the ceremony and reception in the same place
 - The venue did have to be in Southern California (Temecula, Santa Barbara, LA, OC, SD)
 - The time had to allow our reception to go past 10pm
 - All inclusive was preferred
 - I wanted a "smaller" wedding
 - I wanted to be able to pay for this without going into ANY debt
 - I wanted to get this venue booked by the end of January (I know I am crazy)

When I pictured my wedding, I thought winery. I really thought it would be the best place to get married. I started looking into weddings in Temecula, but the city of Temecula has a noise ordinance that all events have to be shut down at 10pm!! Uh, I think not. If I am spending serious money and serious time planning this, we are not stopping at 10pm. So that threw out a lot of amazing places. Darn.

Now I am totally loosing steam. I found a chain of venues called Wedgewood that have a bunch of affordable places all over SoCal. I went with Thomas to look at a couple of them and he wasn't sold on any of them. They have a great business plan of just doing weddings and including everything, which I loved, but in the end it just wasn't for us. I went to look at a few other places, but didn't like them either.

I did come across a place called Serendipity on Weddingbee.com. A few people had commented on how great it was and it was affordable too! The down side is it's in Oak Glen, CA, which most people have never heard of. It's in between Palm Springs and Redlands, so inland empire. The the upside was it looked amazing, however I realized I couldn't get my hopes up because pictures can be deceiving. Thomas and I figured it was worth a peek.

Again, to be continued....