Well it’s been a while since we last shared an extract from our own wedding diary with you and a whole lot’s happened in the meantime! One of the last entries we shared with you was from our visit to the local registry office to notify them of our intent to marry. What we didn’t tell you was that by this point our intentions were not to marry in the local vicinity…
The gap between our wedding diary posts perhaps reflects the seemingly never-ending period where all of our best wedding planning intentions got us precisely NOWHERE! After months of debate and investigating beautiful venues all over Yorkshire we had, in typical fashion, still been unable to decide. We had some front runners but wanted to make sure we’d covered all of our possibilities and so, just to make life really difficult for ourselves, we broadened the search.
We started off extending our options from North Yorkshire to Yorkshire as a whole. Then from Yorkshire to the North of England. Then the South of England. Reminiscing over my time in Edinburgh the idea of a highland wedding came up. Before we knew it we were scouring international wedding blogs and researching what felt like every possible wedding location in the entire world. In fact I was fairly glad that Ridley Scott had got his future predictions slightly wrong when setting Blade Runner in 2019, as had space travel been available to all at this stage I would undoubtedly have been researching tipi weddings on the dark side of the moon.
After days and days of scouring the web for European wedding inspiration and trying to work out the difficult logistics of a destination wedding I think it was Dom’s father who suddenly piped up:
“What about our friend’s that live in the south of France?” They’ve got that huge chateau resort, it’s beautiful. 12th Century isn’t it and acres of land… actually we really need to go there soon!”
This was quite a revelation. The South of France had been one of my first thoughts due to the relative ease of getting there as well as the undeniably beautiful setting. I’d spent hours and hours searching for a suitable location and could have saved myself a day’s work if only he’d said something earlier. I was not best pleased. On the other hand, I thought, he probably hadn’t realised I was looking into that area, it’s not his fault, he’d have said immediately if he’d known…
“Oh yeah” Dom said. “Yeah that’d be an amazing place, me and Liam made their website, it’s perfect!”
There are times in life when no matter how much you love your partner their immediate death seems the only option. This was one of those times. She was saved largely by the initial arrival of dinner and afterwards the wise placement of a cup of tea into my hands.
I set about researching the venue. This proved fairly easy as the website was, perhaps unsurprisingly, easy to navigate. The location, Chateau Coubillou, was indeed incredibly beautiful, with grand architecture, several hectares of land, beautiful rooms and apartments, an amazing courtyard, stunning swimming pool and its own health spa. It looked incredibly promising – we knew the owners, they were both english so there would be no language barriers and the chateau could provide both accommodation for the guests and a beautiful reception setting and, if a marriage license could be obtained, possibly even the ceremony itself! There was however a problem. Firstly they had never actually held a wedding there before – always likely to cause problems down the line even with the best intentions. Worse still though, they were in the middle of major renovation work and although it was due to be completed well before our wedding there were simply no guarantees. I’ve wasted too many mornings watching programmes like “A Place in the Sun” to trust the builders to have the work completed on time and we just couldn’t take the risk that we might be getting married on a building site. Sadly, with Dom in serious danger of falling in love with the place, we had to move on and look elsewhere.
Once more a familiar sinking feeling was embedding itself firmly into the wedding planning process. With our hopes dashed once more and still no venue selected I was starting to think we would be getting married in the shed at the bottom of next door’s garden. Fortunately the mother of the bride had other ideas…
Stay tuned to the blog to find out how those ideas kickstarted our floundering wedding planning and put us back on track!
EUREKA!!
