Ritchie and I got engaged on the 3rd night of a 12 day cruise, so we had just over a week to discuss what we wanted for our wedding before we got home and family and friends began to get involved.  Of course, nearly everything we talked about has now changed, but one thing that we were pretty insistent on was getting married in a vineyard.

It’s not that we’re connoisseurs or anything, in fact I’m lucky if I can get Ritchie to have a glass of wine with me most of the time, but we really enjoyed the day we spent wine tasting in Tuscany and wanted to incorporate it into our wedding.  We thought a vineyard would be a great place to have an outdoor wedding, get great pictures in the vines, and maybe even offer a wine tasting during cocktail hour.

This is why our gut reaction for a destination wedding was Napa Valley or Santa Barbara.  But through some research, I was shocked to see how many vineyards the east coast had to offer.  Since most of his family would come from New York, and most of mine from Delaware and Southern Pennsylvania, we explored a lot of vineyards in central Pennsylvania.  There were so many to choose from!  Here are a few that I found to be very bicoastal friendly- very detailed, easy to navigate web sites and also great with e-mails:

Crossing Vineyards and Winery located in Washington Crossing, PA

Photo via Dave Cross Photography www.davecrossweddings.com

Sand Castle Winery located in Erwinna, PA

Photo via www.sandcastlewinery.com

Spyglass Ridge Winery located in Sunbury, PA

Photo via www.cardensweddingphotography.com

Also, click here for a very helpful guide to all the vineyards in Pennsylvania that are equipped to host weddings.

Photo via www.sanddollarestate.com

One of the first questions we faced when we decided to plan our wedding from the other side of the country was: “Why not a destination wedding?”  (That is, after people say, “You should just elope.”)  To be honest, it’s just not in the cards for us.  We have family all over the country and even though most of them are on the east coast, a destination wedding would be asking everyone to travel instead of just a handful of family members and us.  That means families have to find overnight child care and afford plane tickets that aren’t necessarily in their budget.  We both have large families that we’re close with and it didn’t seem fair to everyone.  In the end, we decided we were willing to incur some inconvenience in order to bring as many people from our large families together for one day.

So even though we’d have loved to get married in the hills of Tuscany or even Napa Valley or Santa Barbara, when we realized how many people would likely not be attending, we started to realize what was more important to us.  Destination weddings can be great to turn your wedding into a vacation with your closest friends and family, but with our large families, it just didn’t make sense.

Did you have a destination wedding?  Were you surprised at the number of people that turned up, or disappointed that not everyone you would have loved to be there made it out?

I’m Jess and this is my fiancé Ritchie. We’re in Venice here.

About 4 hours from now, Ritchie will propose to me on the Rialto Bridge. It’s my dream proposal, and it couldn’t have been more perfect, but it will kick off a windfall of wedding planning from the second we set foot back on our cruise boat. But for now, in this picture, we are blissfully unaware.

This blog will chronicle all of my long distance planning, in which I hope to gain some sort of insight to pass on to others who are doing the same.  Destination wedding be damned, I’m doing this thing bicoastal.