Exciting Developments

Two rather exciting developments today, in no particular order:

First - We finally picked (and bought) our tickets to Germany. We've been debating this for months now -when to leave, how long to take off, what airline to fly, when to best buy tickets for cheap prices. Well, we finally bit the bullet and got the tickets. . . . and boy were they not cheap. Granted, you expect to pay a lot to go to Europe in the summer. . . . but this was just ridiculous. We could fly over there any time last month or this month for about $500, which I consider expensive for the spring since I paid about that for a summer ticket a few years ago. This summer, we can't find anything under $1000. I don't know if it's the economy, the gas prices, general inflation of maybe The World Cup, but that's insane. Most tickets were around $1300, but we managed to get one of the $1000 ones. We fly out of here, into New York LaGuardia, then out of New York JFK (yup, we have to change AIRPORTS in New York - they give us 5 hours to do this though) and into Brussels. At least that's another city we'll get to see. Now we just have to mull over all the possible city options and pick our top few to really concentrate on (top of the list right now are Auschwitz, Krakow, and Prague)- outside of our whirlwind World Cup tour of Germany, of course. Looks like we'll be eating a lot of Ramen Noodles until we leave and a lot of tunafish sandwiches when we get there. :)

Second, we think we finally found a place to have the wedding! I must admit I can't take any credit for this one, considering if it were left to my devices we probably wouldn't have gotten around to picking a venue until sometime in November. We have Cody's mom to thank 100% for this one. She has been an absolute gem with this whole wedding planning process. When I finally realized that I can't do everything and certainly can't do all the planning from 800 miles away and finally got around to asking for (and accepting) help, she has so graciously stepped in and been such a help! She's taken so much of the stress out of this whole ordeal - I'm thankful because I'm not stressing and Cody's happy because he doesn't have to deal with me stressing! She's been on the phone calling the places we were already considering (Armory, Women's Club, Mary Brogan Museum) and even found a new one that we never considered or would have even ever known about - Homewood Suites. I guess it's owned by Hilton and relatively new to Tally (at least it wasn't there when either Cody or I lived there). Anyway, none of the places we had found so far really fit what we were looking for or our budget - until she found this place. It's in hotel so all our friends and family can stay there and be together - a real plus for us with so many people from out of town. They do their own catering, which while it may seem more expensive at first compared to finding your own caterer, everything is included in the price, rather then charging extra for dishes, servers, linens, salt and pepper shakers (no kidding - one of the caterers we found make you rent salt and pepper shakers). The big thing is they let you bring your own alchol and bar!! That saves us a ton of money off paying per drink at the other hotels or reception places! Anyway, his mom and sister went to look at it and took tons of great pictures to really show us what it looked like (I'll put them on the website later for everyone to see). From the photos it looked great and it seems that they liked it so the deposit was placed! The great thing is you can still get your deposit back within 90 days so before that we'll try to make a trip to Tally to check it all out and make final arrangements (not that we forsee having to move it at all)! How exciting!! I really can't explain how grateful we are to them for their help - I keep telling everyone I'm marrying into one of the greatest families ever! Too bad I can't talk them into finding me a wedding dress. . . . I trust their style more then mine any day. :)