Our family has just finished celebrating a wedding in the Rochester area, and I would like to make the following recommendations for future wedding planners.
First, get married in the Rochester region if you can! There were great services and compared to weddings in other larger cities, it was much less expensive.
Second, if you are inviting many out-of-town guests, consider spreading out the activity schedule so that the pace can be more relaxed, and so your guests have more time to 'mellow out' and enjoy each other's company.
What worked for us:
1) having the rehearsal for the Saturday wedding on Thursday; this gave us an extra day to take care of the critical details, work out any bugs, and have more time to relax later on in the weekend with family and friends
2) having the rehearsal dinner at Grinnell's in Brighton - they have a very nice room that accommodates around 40 people - the food and the service were terrific
3) having a party at the home of good family friends on Friday night catered by dinosaur bar-b-que, so out-of-town guests had a place to gather and relax and families could spend time getting to know each other - we had servers from dinosaur set up and serve the food, and the bride's brother's band, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, provided great entertainment
4) having the wedding at Sweet Briar in Geneseo - about 30 miles south of Rochester, overlooking the Genesee Valley - ![[WWW]](https://rocwiki.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
http://www.sweet-briar.net This is arguably one of the most beautiful wedding sites IN THE WORLD, let alone in Rochester; for a summer wedding, for which they have a spacious and beautiful tent on the grounds, they can accommodate at least 200 people; they have a good working relationship with Hawthorne's Catering in Pittsford - the food was great; there are six charming and elegant and very comfortable bedrooms that can be used for overnight accommodation by the wedding party or guests; Will Wadsworth and Barry Kaplan are happy to work to accommodate the personal touches that make a wedding unique; we can't say enough good things about our experience with Sweet Briar. And, to top it all off, Radiance Spa is located there, so a number of us had massages, manicures, pedicures, and wraps on Saturday morning, helping to make us even more relaxed. I am only sorry that we don't have another wedding to plan there!
5) doing our own flowers - I bought beautiful blue pots at Gallea's in Pittsford and planted them five days before the wedding (with help from sisters-in-law and friends) with heliotrope, nicotiana, phlox, and creeping jenny - i do not have a green thumb (that's an understatement!) , but these plants actually lived and thrived and looked beautiful as centerpieces. The pots and plants will live on in the homes of family and friends. Our bride bought cut flowers at Wegmans and tied them with beautiful satin ribbon
6) incorporating the "thousand cranes" tradition as table favors: the bride's sister (and matron of honor) set for herself the challenge of making 1000 origami cranes for the wedding, which is a Japanese tradition to bring luck, long life, and prosperity to the couple; it was a festive and personal addition to the wedding.
7) incorporating family traditions - setting up a table with wedding pictures from generations past, and putting pretty and tasty mints made from a family recipe on each table
8) having a Sunday brunch (at Sweet Briar) where guests could have one last chance to visit with each other before dispersing to their respective home cities.
9) working with a flexible and completely unobtrusive wedding photographer - chrissy albright - see http://blog.chrissyalbright.com/ to see some of the preliminary results
We have wonderful memories of this beautiful event that deepened the relationship of the two families that were brought together by the wedding. And, it was simple, elegant, personal and stayed within a surprisingly reasonable budget.
