The Venue

Now that you know the story, we can start planning! My sister made an observation when I first got engaged: when people hear the news their first question is one of two things. If the person is female, first question is "Can I see the ring?" If the person is male, the first question is "Have you set a date?" This probably says something profound about the difference between guys and gals. Girls like sparkly things and boys like to know when they'll have to show up for things. Who knows? Anyway, to answer all of the men, we started trying to set a date. After discussing all potential scheduling conflicts, we decided sometime toward the middle or end of May would be our best option. Since we met in college and Ryan proposed in the chapel on campus, he really liked the idea of getting married there. I made a call and discovered that the only open time was from 8-2 on May 12th. Graduation for half of our wedding party is at 10 on May 12th. Nope, not gonna work. We discussed some other options, but I really wanted the place we get married to mean something to at least one of us, so the ceremony is going to be at my home church. This left us free to pick just about any date we wanted, so we opted for the next weekend, May 19th.

The next big decision was where to have the reception. We could do it at the church, but most receptions at Baptist churches are really just glorified receiving lines. Not that there's anything wrong with that at all, but it's not really want we wanted. Having the reception at the church is probably more what my family would expect, but his family, not being Baptist, would have other expectations, and this day should be about both of us. We were tossing around ideas for places on the Coast, when I remembered that there's a building next to the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs that has a big room with full wall murals painted by Walter Anderson himself. How perfect! Minimal decoration required (or allowed), unique, dance floor and bar friendly, pretty inexpensive. We called and it was open for our date! Venues: done.

This is the room where our reception will be.

An idea of what it looks like with tables set up.