Source: thefrisky.com
My wedding is going to be in Northern Virginia, but I recently moved down to South Carolina to start a new job. Planning a wedding is difficult enough. Planning a wedding out-of-town adds its own set of challenges.
A friend of mine was planning her New Jersey wedding (where she grew up) from Northern Virginia (where she lives). She was driving up to New Jersey almost every weekend to take care of the details of the wedding. Yikes! Unfortunately (or fortunately), I live too far to drive back up too often and have had to rely on my mom and sister a lot.
Issues I have been facing:
1. If you work, then you likely can only go back for weekends and some places are not open on the weekends. For example, we had to use some magic to get our venue to hold a tasting on a Saturday for us since the chef is usually too busy with the weekend crowd to hold tastings. Notably, most courthouses are not open on weekends so my fiance and I will have to take a day or two off work to go get our marriage license.
2. Hair & make-up trials are turning out to be almost an impossibility. The few weekends that I do plan on going back to VA are so packed with meetings with vendors, etc. that I do not have time. Plus, most hair & make-up artists seem to be really busy on the weekends and don’t have time to meet.
3. Wedding planner. Since I had a few months off before moving down to South Carolina, I thought I could take care of almost everything before moving and couldn’t justify paying for a wedding planner. Now I’m rethinking that decision…
4. Invitations. I hired a print shop in VA to print my invitations and enclosures so that I could later assemble them myself. We timed it so that I could pick it up when I went back up over the Christmas holidays. The print shop screwed it up and didn’t want to redo them, so we had to find another print shop. But because of holiday schedules, my mom had to go to the new print shop for me and will have to pick up the invitations and ship them to me. Ugh.
I think the key to planning an out-of-town wedding (or any wedding for that matter) is to just accept that you cannot control everything and let the little (and even some big) things go.
Does anyone have any advice on out-of-town wedding planning?
Sharon! So sorry to hear about your troubles. I suggest you move back to NoVA…problem solved!
i really wish it were that easy