The Venue -- Part 1

One of the hardest decisions thus far has been choosing the venue for our wedding. We have been to many weddings in the last couple of years... most have been destination. While we love traveling, at times, the destination theme has been a bit financially draining. When it came time to choose our venue one thing we did not want was to plan an elaborate destination that would cost our friends and family to be with us. We did, however, want to have the wedding outside of our city proper. Luckily, we live in beautiful Colorado, so we didn't think this would be much of a challenge.

We figured that in the summer the ski resorts (Vail, Beaver Creek, Winter Park etc...) would offer a great place for our pending nuptials. Guess everyone else figured that too because the price tag on these wonderful towns was completely out of our budget for the number of guests we will have. At one resort (I won't mention any names) we were thrilled to find that we actually could afford to get married on the top of the mountain and have a great Saturday evening reception!! As I spoke to their event coordinator I was in complete shock that we could actually do this until she mentioned at the end of the convo one little fee that we should consider. "You'll need to know that you'll have to pay to run the gondola for the event. It's just a little fee -- $900 per hour -- and it's a minimum of 6 hours." (what?!? you've gotta be kidding me. I knew it was too good to be true. For our event that would be over $5000. A third of our entire budget first of all, and I can think of a million things I'd rather spend five grand on rather than a gondola --letterpress anyone?).

So, whereas the ski resorts are beautiful and I'm insanely jealous of all the brides that can come up with the dough to host their events on the mountain, for this CO couple we had to get creative. Enter Taos...