okay so step one in our wedding planning adventure: decide on a venue and date.

neither victor or myself wanted a religious setting. My baby boomer hippie parents raised my sisters in the church of "be nice to people and try not to judge" and Victor had a reform Jewish upbringing.

we both love nature and wanted to show our guests the majestic beauty of the great state of California. since we wanted the wedding to be in the greater Bay Area we knew that would either be the forest or the beach.

nothing against beaches, but I'm really more of a forest girl. we can probably attribute this to growing up on a dirt road in Michigan and yard that backed up to the woods. (This acute self awareness is definitely the result of bachelors degree in psychology.)

so we looked at about a dozen redwood forest venues in the Bay Area. there was the Mather grove at uc botanical gardern,

the the piedmont community center, and old mill park in mill valley.

but ultimately the right place for us was up in the north bay.

I first saw deer park villa on one of those wedding websites, but it wasn't until I saw my coworker Katie's wedding pictures on Facebook that it really caught my eye.

so we went up and visited and knew pretty much instantly this was it.

in addition to having an awesome redwood grove this place was really chill and normal, which we found was surprisingly important to us. They don't have any stupid ("no scattering petals or leaves of any kind") or strict ("everyone must be out by 10pm and we stop serving alcohol at 9pm") policies. also they are down with food trucks.