Venues...

When it comes to venues, you need to sit down and work out - what do you want? Do you want to get married in a church/chapel, do you want to hire a house and caterers separately, do you want to have a huge marque somewhere you love, a registry office, or do you want to get married in a hotel and have everything done under one roof like I did.

Now, I'm on the the ones who didn't think about this at first, so I spent hours, days, even weeks, looking at a mixture of places without just thinking 'what do I want'. Eventually I made my mind up and decided that I wanted to a lovely hotel in a lovely setting, where all of my guests could stay - I just had to find it.

So I got on the Internet and began looking. However, I made the mistake at just searching for hotels in the lake district, without looking at the Cumbrian registry office website, to see the list of hotels where your permitted to get married (that's right, it's not ALL of them) Luckily the hotel that caught my eye was on the list!

Eventually I had my list of 5 hotels to go and look at. First up - Lakeside hotel in Newby bridge. I rang up and made my appointment. When we got to the hotel, I had the feeling (cliché I know) about the place. It had everything we wanted. It was on the lake, had 2 beautiful wedding rooms (one for a large wedding, and one for a small wedding like mine), the Taff were friendly and helpful, and it was surprisingly affordable.

Now, it might have seem hasty but we both decided that this was the venue for us, so we cancelled all of the other appointments and made a provisional booking for the Lakeside hotel. All we had to do now was everything else...