Church and Reception Hall

I feel a church wedding was appropriate for us.  I'm glad Gus' childhood church was large enough to accomdate our large guest list because my childhood church is way too small.

We originally decided on Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church - Minneapolis campus. 

Next up, finding a reception hall for the most popular weekend in the fall.  UGH!  I spent a Friday at work contacting roughly 30 - 40 recpetion venues and at least half said they were already booked for our weekend.  We had already put money down for the church so changing the date wasn't an option.  One of the last places I contacted, Lake Waconia Event Center was open.  We toured the venue on October 26 and signed and sent the deposit on Oct 29.  We loved the event center.  It is spacious and rustic bar look.  We are the only wedding at the event center and it is a little cheaper than most venues. 

We were worried that there was going to be too much time in between the wedding and the dinner and now we are going to make our guests travel about 30 miles between the church and reception.  Not ideal but we were going to make it work.

Until... we looked at the Mt. Olive Luthern Church - West Campus in Victoria, MN.  We drove by the church on our way home from touring the reception hall.  It was perfect and if we could reserve that church it would work on much better.  So Sunday night (Oct 27) I contacted the wedding coordinator to see if the West Campus was available.  I was less than hopefully when I heard back from her on Monday and she said there was another bride that had Oct 4 and another weekend in Oct reserved.  The bride was going to make a decision by the end of the week and we would know than if we could have the West Campus church.  So the waiting began....

Low and behold, the bride choose that other weekend in Oct.  BEST NEWS EVER!

We quickly responded and said we will take Oct 4th at the West Campus.  Next good news, we were the only wedding booked for that day so far and we got to pick our ceremony and rehearsal time.  SWEET!

So if you followed all of this here are the final details for the church and reception:

Rehearsal Date and Time: Oct 3 at 5pm
Church: Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church - West Campus
Location: Victoria, MN
Time: 3pm ceremony
Reception: Lake Waconia Event Center
Location: Waconia, MN
Dinner time: TBA