Update on the Wedding Front

After looking at a total of 7 places, we finally found where we are getting married. Every time we found some place we liked we realized that we couldn't afford it and we got depressed. We finally found a place that is what we were looking for with a decent price tag attached. Our magical venue is called Anthony's Pier Nine in New Windsor, New York. This place is HUGE!! I got some exercise just taking a tour of the place.

Since we were having trouble finding an affordable place, Nicole asked a few of her friends that were getting married for some advice. One of them told her about Pier Nine. Nicole researched it, liked what she saw so we checked it out a week and a half ago.

The first thing we noticed when walking up to the door were the fountains and the Cinderella carriage.

This was taken from their website. I don't know who these people are.

As we were walking through the different rooms, the lady was telling us that a lot of stuff was about to be renovated. The cocktail room was totally getting changed, it is going to be extended and have more natural light come in to it. The outdoor gardens were being upgraded with an outdoor bar and gazebo. As she was explaining this to us I was thinking "ca-ching, ca-ching," the price was going up in my head. I was getting worried that this place was going to be too much too. The cheapest place we found close to home was $109 per person. With what she was telling us I was thinking somewhere between $125 & $150.

The smaller room holds a minimum of 125 people which is the one we chose. The bigger room requires a minimum of 200 (which we don't think we could do) but it has a glass elevator that comes out of a stage for the bride and groom to come up in. How awesome is that? There is also a hidden set of stairs that open up to walk down onto the dance floor for the first song. I wish we knew more people. You are all invited if you can cover your plate plus 25%. We would get married in the new outdoor garden or inside facing the outdoor garden. I hope October 20th 2012 is a nice night.

You are all probably wondering about the price, I will tell you at the end. Yup, I'm a tease. Did someone say they wanted to know what was on the menu? The menu is loaded with food. There is enough in the cocktail hour to be fully satisfied. After she mentioned what was came with the cocktail hour, she said and now I will show you the entrees, I was like there's more? I'm not going to go into detail with what's on the menu because I'm just going to get hungry. I'm not sure if the menu is on their website but you can go here to check. There are drinks passed out 30 minutes before cocktail hour in case anybody arrives early and gets antsy.

There are so many things I want to tell you about this place but I don't want this post to get to long. They have a trolley service for our guests from the hotel to the venue, included in the package. We get 5 rooms (one of them the honeymoon suite) included in our package. The cake is included. Did I mention all new renovations? Brand new rooms and gardens just for us :-)
The renovations are scheduled to be finished by March of 2011, plenty of time. She assured us of that finish date. They did renovations in some of the other rooms and her boss was a stickler for finishing on time, the construction crew finished exactly when they were suppose to.

We told Nicole's parents about the place. We all went back last week for another look see and to get their opinion on it. They liked it. The only negative comment was that it is far away. It is 45 minutes from where I currently live and it would be between an hour and a half to 2 hours for Nicole's family that lives in the city. They can stay at the hotel, no big deal. We put our John Hancock's on the contract and gave them our deposit. Most places required a 15-20% deposit. This place was only $1000 plus another $3000 spread over the next year and then the final payment a week before the wedding.

You wanna know the price per person? For what we get, only $75 per person. I thought that was a great deal and we just had to jump on it. We love this place. We can't wait to go for a tasting which is done on a day of somebody else's wedding so we can try what they actually serve. Also the gardens are suppose to be done in August so we can take a look at those.

I apologize for the long post. There was just too much to tell. I probably missed a few things but I can't think of them now so it doesn't matter. Yay, we booked our venue!!! Woo-hoo!!