So last Saturday Aviva and I got up bright and early (for a Saturday), ate some breakfast and headed north to check out some places we thought we might want to hold the wedding. One of my first comments to Aviva when she said that we should do this was, "Are you serious? The wedding is like 16 months away!" ... let me just say now that the amount of things I do not understand about weddings fills up more than a breadbox.
So we started looking. But because I want to keep this post relatively brief, I will not go into the details of the search, but you should all know that we spent a number of evenings pouring over bridal magazines and through The Knot and Wedding Locations and New York Weddings and god knows how many other sites. Thankfully (or not, depending on our mood at the time), we had a number of specific parameters that we wanted to meet, which helped us narrow the list quite a bit.First off, you would be surprised at how many places in New York say that they can do Kosher weddings ... I mean I know that all the Jews in the world live here, but still, literally everywhere can do Kosher catering (now this does not actually mean that the places have Kosher kitchens, it means that you can pay A LOT extra to have a kosher caterer come in from outside and make up a good meal).
Nope, the big factor for winnowing down the locations was my strong, strong desire to have it at a location that was not a "wedding factory", and felt like it was outside the city and "among the trees." Yes, I now realize those are very vague desires, something which Aviva realized before I did (this realization subsequently drove her nuts for a while as she tried to figure out what I meant). So then we found big places, for 400+, which effectively eliminated all the castles that I was looking at (Oheka, the only castle left that holds that many guests, was so expensive that only the Rockefellers could actually get married there).
Then came the actual looking, which, fortunately enough, only took up two Saturdays and half a Sunday .... the first Saturday we looked only at places we didn't like. After an unpleasant day, we decided to go look at a place we really liked but was too small. We loved it, of course. But we decided to check out more places before modifying our wedding plans to suit the location.But the next weekend, after looking at our favorite place again, along with a number of other places that we liked better ... we decided to go with our guts. So, next spring, we are going to be gettin' hitched at the Tarrytown House.
