Spring Weddings

In the last month or so, Mr. Bean and I have been to two weddings: one was a friend from our old youth group (that’s where I took these jumping shots) and the other was one of Mr. Bean’s brothers! Instead of showing 50 billion photos, I made little collages for each wedding of my favourite photos, similar to the ones I did for the 2010 weddings we went to. Please do click them to see the larger version of them!

The wedding reception was held at the golf course my parents go to, where they recently renovated their club house. I love going to eat there as they are SO good with allergies – Mr. Bean went and told one of the servers my allergies, then the chef came out and asked me what I wanted/could eat and ended up making me my own separate meal as I couldn’t eat much in the buffet. After having so much food angst at the weddings last year, it was wonderful! They even had a mashed potato bar around 11pm – seriously amazing.

Mr. Bean’s brother’s wedding was the first wedding I’ve been to where I have been a member of the immediate family. I was spoiled for taking photos – I sat in the front row of the church (even though I had the actual photographer in front of me most of the time) and one of the front and centre tables at the reception. It meant that I didn’t have to bring my creeper (70 – 300mm) lens!

A few funny things happened at this wedding: first the church was tiny and over 200 people were invited to the wedding. I think they managed to fit about 160 people in, which is still a feat as the church would comfortably fit 80 – 90 people. Again, I was glad that Mr. Bean and I were doing a reading as it guaranteed us a spot in the front! Secondly, the priest got confused about who was getting married as he said Mr. Bean’s other brother was getting married (in his defence their names both start with “G”), so I turned to Mr. Bean and said “Well, it looks like both your brothers are in for a surprise!”

The reception was held at the Banff Springs Hotel. Holy man is it a ritzy hotel – it was built in the 1880s by Canadian Pacific Railways for their rich European clientele and it has maintained that level of upscale-ness since. We stayed there for two nights and it was really nice! The reception was probably one of the best I’ve been to – the food was amazing (I wouldn’t have expected anything less!) and everything was beautiful and perfectly executed. I even had a server come and introduce herself to me to confirm my allergies and everything she brought to me were my allergy friendly versions of what everyone else ate. She even brought me my own gluten free chocolate cake for dessert. (!) I was super impressed.

I thought that these two weddings were going to be our weddings for 2011, but we received two more invitations in the mail in the last week. Thankfully both of them are in Calgary, so we don’t have to travel! Now I’m just hoping that no one else decides to get married this year so we don’t try to break last year’s record of five weddings in a year. But even if anyone does, I will happily go as I honestly love weddings. Good thing too!

Have you been to any weddings lately?