The Perfect Place for a Wedding Ceremony

So I mentioned in my last post that once the Architect and I decided on the Bar Harbor region for our wedding, we immediately knew where we wanted the wedding ceremony to take place. ...and here it is. The Thuya Garden in Northeast Harbor, Maine. This was one of the first places that the Architect took me to, on our very first trip up to Bar Harbor back in 2006. The garden is set up on a cliff, overlooking picturesque Northeast Harbor.

Photo taken by the Architect -- What an amazing view!

It is an intensely beautiful and completely peaceful location. What a perfect place for a wedding.

Photo taken by the Architect

Source

Source

Source

Source

Source

Even better... groomsman C had once mentioned in passing that some friends of his had been married in the Thuya garden. What we didn't know, was that these friends had had a 15-person extremely informal wedding ceremony in the garden, with no chairs, no decorations, and therefore no set-up or clean-up to think of. When we asked about possibly having our wedding in the Thuya Garden we were dealt some bad news. If we wanted the wedding to be during the summer, it would have to be small, and we couldn't use chairs. Well, ok, we were planning a small wedding. Just how small is small? The answer -- less than 20 people. Umm... yeah, well when we said our wedding was going to be small, we meant more like 100 people. Also, we were planning on having a short, secular ceremony, but the ceremony would still probably be long enough that our guests would appreciate having a place to sit down. Of course, the other possibility was to have a wedding in the off season -- June and September were possibilities. Then the garden would let us have as many people (and chairs!) as we wanted, within reason. We were pretty worried about this option though. The weather in Maine is reliably, well, unreliable. The summer -- July and August -- are pretty much the only times of year that you can count with reasonable certainty on having good weather. Since we were hoping for an outdoor ceremony, we were pretty set on getting married in the warm sunny summer months.

...and it was back to the drawing board.

Did we manage to find the ceremony location of our dreams in the end? You'll have to stay tuned to find out. Did you come across any roadblocks in your quest to find the perfect ceremony location? Do tell...