We Threw a Wedding Party For the Ages

If I could give one piece of advice to future brides it would be to do your wedding the way YOU want. Ryan and I had planned to do a destination wedding with a separate party even pre-COVID and I could not have pictured a better wedding season for us than this. We never received outside pressure to do our wedding a certain way, which I will be forever grateful for.

After getting married in Key West with 25 of our closest friends, we knew we needed to throw a party for our extended friends and family up in Minnesota. When choosing the location, the Como Lake Pavilion just made sense to us. It’s about two miles from our home and we often walk around Como Lake. For those that don’t live here, Como Pavilion is a large promenade space that overlooks the lake and often hosts concerts and other events. It’s a city park, so on nights when events aren’t happening people can go in and sit and look at the lake or have dinner.

Just over 200 of our friends and family were able to attend the event in which we did all the ‘normal’ wedding things: had a DJ, photo booth & photographer. We didn’t want a formal event so we just did heavy hors d’oeuvres and cupcakes in more of an open house type of event. One of the highlights of the event was my sister and her boyfriend coordinating a video from Brett Favre congratulating us on our wedding! I’ve been a huge Brett Favre fan since childhood, so that was a surprise I’ll never forget.

A few of the pros to having a two-event wedding: You get two events! The wedding in Key West was everything we wanted it to be, in our favorite place on earth with our closest friends and family. And then after the wedding was done we had another event to look forward to. There were no post-wedding blues because we had another wedding-related event to look forward to.

A few of the cons to having a two-event wedding: It’s a lot of planning. I know a lot of brides can get overwhelmed by the planning process and having to plan two events can be A LOT. It certainly was two different types of planning, however. I didn’t deal with caterers or a photo booth down in Florida. Our Florida wedding was mostly handled by the company I booked our wedding event through, so there were definitely less small details to manage. In Minnesota, I had to work with an event manager, photographer, photo booth company, DJ, bakery and a host of others.

We felt incredibly lucky to be able to host two amazing events that celebrated our eight years together. We have had so many supportive people along the way to help us and celebrate us and it was great to be able to get everyone together after a long time apart. Have questions about destination weddings or hosting two wedding events? Don’t hesitate to reach out!