the venue

so it took us a good couple months to nail down a venue. i think we looked at about 20 venues if not more. the places were compiled from blogs and pictures I had seen or even here comes the guide. there were several things we knew:
1. we wanted to get married nearby. no destination wedding. and anything that was more than an hour's drive was kind of out of the question. this eliminated tahoe, carmel or monterey but included napa, sonoma, healdsurg, sf, marin etc i was a bit opposed to east bay and also peninsula but we ended up in peninsula
2. we wanted to get married outside.
3. we wanted to get married next summer/fall
4. we wanted the party to go past 10 or 11pm

there were also some things that i thought i really wanted but eventually fell off the list. I thought i wanted to get married under a big old oak tree. i know it sounds silly, but the pictures ive seen where the ceremony takes place under an oak tree struck a cord with me. i loved it. another thing i thought i wanted was a big barn.
The excel i kept of all the venues had about 100 places listed. we eliminated a bunch right from the getgo due to high site fees. in retrospect, the rate isnt just dependent on the site fee though that is a big part of it. but the main thing is the cost per person for food and alcohol. even though the site we ended up with was closer to the higher end of our site fee threshold, the food and beverage was a lot lower than some places we had looked at. that brought the grand total down quite a bit.

at one point we thought we wanted a hotel. hotels can be very expensive because you do everything through them. we thought that people could stay with us especially our out of town family members and friends which made up for about half of the guest count.

we actually visited the calistoga hotels twice thinking that we would go with one of them but the price was just too much. so then we began to look in the peninsula too. mainly palo alto. once we saw mountain terrace it was hard to look at anything else. we were comfortable with the price. the venue was beautiful. we could stay at a nearby hotel/resort. everything just seemed to fit.