It snowed a foot here on Sunday. I am excited for summer and driving to places that are warmer and prettier than Champaign, IL.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
Tentative Tour Dates!
Mica battles a snowdrift!
Today, we are two months out from getting married, hooray! And we are 79 days out from the kickoff of Wedding Victory Tour! Here is a list of rough tour dates where we have confirmed that we will be couch-surfing with some very generous friends and family. If we are coming to a city near you, feel free to drop us a line, and we will try to meet up! We’d like to see as many of you as possible as we make our way around the country.
* denotes an unconfirmed destination.
5/24 – Get married!
5/24-6/11 – Celebrate with friends and family around Virginia
6/12 – Leave Richmond, VA, tour kickoff!
6/14 – Hanover, NH
6/15 – Miscellaneous Canada*
6/22 – Boston, MA
6/25 – NYC
6/29 – Medina, OH
6/30 – St. Louis, MO
7/2 – Champaign, IL
7/5 – Chicago, IL
7/13 – Seattle, WA*
7/15 – Mountain View, CA
7/19 – San Francisco, CA
7/22 – Los Angeles, CA*
7/23 – San Diego, CA
7/25-8/2 – Return to Richmond via San Antonio, TX*, Atlanta, GA*, & Durham, NC
8/2 – Return to Richmond, VA
Let the crowdsourcing begin!
On the surface, a wedding seems to involve primarily two people, the two who are getting married. However, as pretty much anyone (or any book) will tell you, weddings are often the result of the collaborative efforts of many different parties. In fact, I remember fondly from my Slavic Folklore class (???) in college that traditional weddings were a village affair, from the making of the dowry to the wedding meal to the parading of a bloody sheet in the streets the next day. (Ew.)
WVT is not a traditional ceremony, reception, or honeymoon, but I’d like to think that we are following in the time-honored tradition of crowdsourcing our wedding. We’ve already done a fair share of this: Ashley and Tina, my bridesmaids cum web designers, put together this website. And I’d like to think that in lieu of reception activities (DJs, dancing, bouquet tossing), our friends and families will provide the best kind of entertainment: time spent together!
This week, my lovely friend Hannah drew this awesome picture for us. Soon, I will begin my first foray into wedding crafts and attempt to style this into some sort of invitation for our Richmond friends. (We’re thinking about going out in the evening, so in effect, please save the date, May 24th, 2013!)
Gangnam style…still relevant!
Now that it’s time to finish Harrison’s dissertation and look for jobs plan the road trip, we have some questions for you, gentle readers. The US is a very large place, and we haven’t been to a lot of it. We’d love to get some ideas for this road trip from our many friends and family, spread all over the country and with diverse tastes and interests.
Feel free to answer in the comments below or shoot us an email (if you have *private* suggestions, haha).
- What’s your favorite hotel or hotel chain?
- What’s your favorite city in the continental US?
- What’s your favorite restaurant? (RVA people, what’s your favorite Richmond restaurant?)
- What landmark (site, park, monument, etc.) do you recommend visiting?
- What do you do to pass the time in the car (games or otherwise)?
Thanks in advance for your input! We’re excited to read it!
Libby Hill Park: Richmond on the James!
Well, dearest readers, we finally have an officiant and have chosen the venue for our upcoming nuptials on May 24th, 2013. Something modest and under-budget because that’s how we roll.
I have just discovered Highclere Castle can be rented for weddings to the tune of £15,000+VAT. Yeah, no big deal, right?
Actually, we are delighted to announce that we will be getting married in a more cost-effective venue that is slightly closer to home: Richmond’s Libby Hill Park!
Here’s a boring, nearly five-minute video of it:
According to the city’s Parks & Recreation website, Libby Hill is one of the three original parks in Richmond. My favorite thing about it is the nice view of the river. In fact, this is how Richmond got its name–it resembles a view of Richmond on the Thames in England, hurrah!
In the event of rain, we plan to camp out and have a very short ceremony under the porch of the park house.
Libby Hill Park House, Richmond, VA
One of the many benefits of having such a small, weekday morning wedding is that we didn’t have to make an official reservation for the park. I doubt anyone is going to be using the park on a Friday morning. And if other people are milling around, there’s enough green space that we will be able to find some room to get married.
Our officiant, Mr. Mehfoud, is a Richmond celebrant who has been marrying couples since 1978 and even married stepdad Steve’s cousin and his wife Laura two years ago. When I spoke to him on Tuesday, he said that he knows his short, secular ceremony by heart. We’ll be married quickly and unobtrusively, but officially and awesomely!
Now that we have the majorly important things (venue, celebrant, photographer) in line, it’s time to start planning the road trip in earnest. After Harrison turns in his dissertation draft next week, we’ll start poring over the road trip books we got for Christmas and scouring the Interwebs for cool destinations.
And also, Kayla and I started a collaborative board on Pinterest today, just for the sheer joy of distracting ourselves with wedding crafts. Because who wants to write a comprehensive exam on ESL grammar when you can make decorations out of coffee filters and whiffle balls…
Confirmed: No Richmond Courthouse wedding
Still disbelieving that we couldn’t have a Courthouse wedding, I e-mailed the clerk of Richmond City Circuit Court this past week:
Dear Judge [Name],
My fiancé and I are Richmond natives, and we plan to get married on Friday, May 24th of this year. We would like to get married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse, but I could not find any information about doing this on the Richmond Circuit Court website.Is it possible for us to schedule an appointment with you or another official to get married (with our parents in attendance) at the Richmond Circuit Court?Thank you so much!-Mica S.
The next day, I received this response:
To whom it may concern:
Please be advised that at this time Richmond Circuit Court does not perform marriages. We do offer a list of Civil Celebrants. You are welcome to call them and make arrangements. Please see the attached list.
Thank you,
[Circuit Court Deputy Clerk]
So far, we’re 0/5 with wedding officiants. Four will be out of town on our wedding day, and the fifth charged an all-inclusive fee of $225. Given the small size of our ceremony, this was too far out of our budget.
While many people have suggested having a friend or relative officiate the ceremony, this is not ideal for a few reasons:
- We don’t want to worry about writing a ceremony.
- We want to spend our ceremony and post-ceremony lunch with our parents; choosing one friend or relative becomes sticky in this situation.
Tomorrow, more phonecalls!
Wedding Victory Tour 