My next natural inclination was to get a guest list number to see what we were dealing with. I knew it would be a big number. After going back and forth between both sets of families, the estimate was 378! This new information knocked out about 70% of the venues that I had bookmarked or liked.
Since my future in laws were helping to pay for the reception, we devised a system of booking appointments to look at venues on Saturday mornings. The first venue we visited lied on their website on how many people it could hold. Or you could probably hold 400 with tables set up in a completely different room. Fail. After about 5 visits, we narrowed it down to two choices - the hotel vs. the banquet hall.
I honestly fell in love with the hotel. It was built in 2009. Everything was sparkling new. The bar had a flat screen tv. But it was at the tip top of our budget. Also, Danny loves Jim Beam and their house brand of bourbon was Jack Daniels. We would have to pay extra for a longer bar time. We knew we wanted our carnival theme for appetizers and it just seemed like we would have to work so hard to fit our theme in these food and drink packages.
Enter the banquet hall. I wanted so much to hate it but each feature was better than the next! We could bring in our own alcohol! The dance floor was huge! They were flexible with food options! What really sold me was that the dj that we had excitedly booked too early had played there before and was familiar with how to set up their equipment there. The one catch was that we had to change our date to the weekend before. At this point, I was fine with the date change. I had a heart to heart with my future FIL and decided on the banquet hall! Yay! Now we can move forward!
