>The Two Ends of the Spectrum
>In April, we finally made a trip down to Savannah to look at venues. Courtney and I were joined my by parents and Rachel (my Maid of Honor). Luck would have it that our first appointment was at the fanciest (and by far the most expensive, with a $20k food and beverage minimum) of all of our venues, the Mansion at Forsyth Park. I had my eye on this beauty since I bought my first issue of Savannah Weddings and checked out their webpage.
We saw the courtyard and their beautiful ballroom and were shown pictures of many lovely wedding receptions that had been held there (and subsequently told about how most of them had ended in nasty divorces). The Mansion was beautiful, but it just didn’t feel right. It felt too formal, too controlled, and a bit pretentious. “It’s just not funky enough” was all I could voice, but of course no one (myself included) had any clue what I meant by that.
Courtney, however, was sold by their professionalism (or perhaps her line about how great he would look in a seersucker tux. Ironically, for me this was the straw that broke that poor camal’s back).
I left, agreeing the come back the next day to see the venue set up for a reception, but with my mind made up that this was not the place for us.
After a debriefing lunch to discuss our first adventure into the land of decisions (Courtney was shocked to hear that I didn’t feel the same way about the place as he did; he said that he had thought that I had been ‘eating it right up’) we headed to appointment number two: Savannah Station. I will clarify here that by ‘headed’ I mean we walked until we had left what felt like the city limits, past a run down gas station and behind some seemingly abandoned apartment complexes, to venue number two.
The fact that we looked at these two places back to back made it blatantly apparent that they were polar opposites. Where as the Mansion is right on beautiful Forsyth Park, Savannah Station is in a sort of shoddy part of town. And their hostesses were about as different from one another as venues they represented
The foyer of Savannah Station is a bar room setting with walls painted a beautiful deep red and an amazing chandelier. The ‘ball room’ looked more like the inside of a barn or warehouse, but to me it reeked of potential. Even the bathrooms had a vintage feel. All of a sudden, I could explain what I meant when I said the Mansion was not funky enough. This was the funk that I wanted. Courtney, however, looked like he was about to fall asleep as our host described her style of organizing a reception (basically, that she didn’t do a whole lot of organizing and was more about going with the flow) and even my mom was not sold by the fact that the Station had it’s own troop of feral cats that they cared for.
I was in love, but outnumbered.
