Megan + Mike | Mad Dash to the Altar in Minneapolis

Today’s post is from bride Megan. She shares her fabulous whirlwind story of the planning weekend madness. The setup: her and Mike to a pre-wedding trip to Minneapolis to iron out the last minute details for their destination wedding. Knowing this was going to be an amazing amount of planning in one short weekend, I asked them to be reporters for us on the highs, lows and in-betweens of planning a destination wedding in a weekend! Here is their news report pre-wedding trailer video:

Wedding planning can be a full time job. Thank goodness I am a teacher and have the summers off. Well partly off, because the last two summers I have had a full time job of being a wedding planner. We are currently three weeks from our wedding and have so much to do! You would think we would be more prepared given we have been engaged for a year and a half.

The speed-read version of our hectic life:

We got engaged January 2012, Mike moved to Michigan February 2012, I finished graduated school May 2012, I moved to Michigan and stated a new job August 2012, we got a new puppy January 2013, bought a new house June 2013, moving into the house in July 2013, and then are planning to get married August 2013. We chose to get married in Minnesota where my extended family lives. At the time, we thought this was a fabulous idea… Bride’s family lives there, we will be living in Michigan so we won’t be that far away, and Minnesota is beautiful in the summer. This would be a lot for anyone, but the fact we also had to plan an out-of-state wedding as well made life a bit crazy.

We also chose to not have a wedding planner and do almost everything ourselves. We leaned a lot on Chrissy (my sister) who lives in Minneapolis, but it was still a lot to find all the vendors, negotiate all of the contracts and make sure everything was ready to go…We decided to have a true “Twin Cities” wedding and have the reception at the James J. Hill Reference Library in St. Paul and the ceremony at the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in downtown Minneapolis.

Now that we are sitting here three weeks from the big day, I can start to see where this vision we’ve had is moving towards. We spent the weekend in the Twin Cities having all of our final meetings. We had an absolute whirlwind weekend. We left at 7 am on Friday for Minnesota from Detroit. That day alone, we had seven meetings! We were absolutely exhausted but were feeling much better than we had about the process and how everything was coming full circle. We met with the church coordinator (Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church), photographer (Camelot Photography), day of planner (Simply Elegant Bridal), caterer (Lettuce Catering), beverage company (Minathoe), rehearsal dinner venue (Salut), and met for our marriage license.

On Saturday, we were down to three meetings. We met with the hotel (Crowne Plaza Riverfront), reception venue (James J. Hill Reference Library) and our florist (Munster Rose). Our vendors were amazing and continued to put our minds at ease as we went through the weekend. That night we took a little break from wedding planning to spend time with my sister, brother-in-law, and nieces. Since we were meeting with the band director the next day we put them to work helping us find songs. We had not picked our first dance song or any other songs we wanted played for that matter.  We were able to unwind and have many laughs while searching YouTube and other sites for good wedding songs. Sunday was our shortest but longest and hardest day. We spent three hours at our church meeting with our wonderful pastor for our marriage counseling session.

When we left the church we were both ready for bed. It was an emotionally exhausting experience. But, of course, we were not done yet. We have our last meeting with the band director (Sevilles). He was an absolute character. We were excited and concerned all at the same time. He said we did not need the playlist we had just spent the night working on haha. We only needed to tell him our first dance songs and he would take it from there. We were only concerned because we had to let go of all control and leave it up to him. This is not something we are very good at doing. We then headed back to the airport and back home to our puppy and an apartment full of boxes.

I will be spending the next week and a half packing up our apartment (because this was another fabulous idea). We have a bought a house so we are closing and moving a week and a half before the wedding. I will then head back to Minnesota to enlist my family for help and finish up the rest of the fun and tedious details that go along with planning a wedding. If I do not have grey hair by the time of my wedding it will be a miracle.