Karen, you know what we haven't ever talked about with the audience. Well,
there's a lot, you know what. You're right, Let me rephrase
that. There's one story in particular that we tell a lot to our friends
that we've not shared with our friends on the other side of this microphone.
Okay, which one is that? The day of our wedding? Oh?
Yes, So do you remember when you know what? I'm going to let
you tell the story because you tell it so well, So Karen, take
it away. Well, I don't know if the real story is the day
of the wedding. I think it's everything leading up to the wedding. It's
actually the entire thing. It's all a great story and really important in this
context. Well, so how far back do you want to go? Well,
let's just start with when we're looking for the site. Okay, Well
that's easy enough. So we meaning. I love the fall colors and the
leaves, and it's something growing up in Florida that I have not really experienced
a lot. So the few times I've seen it have blown me away.
And so for our wedding, I wanted to be amidst that beauty. So
I wanted to go somewhere in the fall and be outside and have these beautiful
colors. So we decided to go to North Carolina and start looking at different
locations. Well, we saw quite a few different locations, and all of
them none of them were what we were hoping for. A lot of farmhouses
and pumpkins. Yes, a lot of people wanted to do jack o lanterns,
and I mean not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just
not what we wanted. Right, we should mention we're looking to get married
relatively quickly, probably sometime in November. It was October October. We had
a six week engagement and no, I wasn't pregnant. We just were really
excited to start our lives together and we didn't really feel the need to delay.
We didn't want to have a huge wedding so anyway, so we started
looking and found all these lovely people with very different styles than ours. We
wanted something beautiful and elegant and simple and just lovely, and so we had
pretty much given up hope, at least I think I had. And we
decided to go to Asheville because it's a beautiful city. Will had never been
there, and we wanted to go check it out, and what were your
impressions of ash Oh, my gosh, it's an amazing city. It's a
tiny little city that feels so much larger than it really is. It it's
beautiful, it's very artistic, a lot of great energy there, really great
energy. Well, so we got there just to check out the town and
kind of give up and make the rest of the trip about us having a
great weekend. And we were walking through the downtown area in the evening and
just kind of looking at the inside the shops and you know, the windows,
most of them are closed, but we saw one with some lights on
and I look in and I see a bride walking across the room and the
room is all lit up and decorated, and I'm like, ah, well,
there's a bride. Something to do with weddings, what is this?
People get married in Asheville. So then we saw a sign on the kind
of the bottom of the door that said, you know, if you're interested
in booking the venue, here's the number. So the next day, which
was I think a Sunday, which of course everything is closed, we call
and surprisingly enough we get an answer, and it was the sweetest lady Egyptian
lady. Do you remember her? I do, our very godmother, very
godmother. Yes. So she agreed to meet with us in like an hour,
and so we went to meet with her and we sat down and it's
inside this really neat. It's a room that's in an old, old building
with exposed brick walls and wooden floors and high ceilings, and it just was
beautiful. And she's like, oh, yes, you can have your celebration
here. You know, I'll have to figure out a place for your ceremony.
But when are you looking to get married? And we're like, oh,
we'd like to do it in October. And she's like, oh,
that's fantastic that it had done. She puts down October. What was the
year. Well, she starts looking at her date book. Yeah, and
she's looking and we realized it was a year away oct twenty, two thousand
and nine. Yeah. We said, no, no, it's two thousand
and eight, and she laughing, and six weeks away and closed the date
book. Well, apparently we learned that Ashville is the second most sought after
a wedding destination in the country. So I said, all right, we'll
keep looking and we enjoyed the rest of our day in Asheville and went on
our married way home to Florida. Well, within a week, we get
a phone call from her and she says, well, how would you guys
feel about getting married on a Sunday? Like, I'm good with Sunday.
Sunday's okay with me. It's good for good enough for the Lord, it's
good enough for us exactly. So we're like, she said, well,
we just got a cancelation and my venue is open on a Sunday for your
reception. So I don't know if we can find caterer's photographers. I don't
know where you're going to have your wedding, but you can have the after
party here. But let me help you. Look. So, little by
little, the phone calls start coming in from her and she has found a
photographer that had a cancelation, musicians that had a cancelation. Everything. It
was the craziest thing. All these people had a cancelation on that day and
they were her preferred vendors. Yes, and then she found us the most
beautiful location, the most perfect location. Karen wanted to be married outside with
the leaves changing, and I started to take over the story over. But
then she came back to us with a mansion that happened to have a small
glen, outdoor glen with you have to go down these little steps, stone
like stone steps, and it's kind of deep down. Yeah, I was
a steep stone steps leading down into this gorgeous glen with a wedding altar,
a beautiful stone, very rustic looking, covered by trees and plants. It
was like a fairy wedding. And it just so happened that they had a
cancelation. Surprise, surprise, So it seems like all the stars were aligning.
Yeah, they were, absolutely. And then, of course, as
it is in North Carolina in October, it is brutally cold. But the
days leading up to the wedding, oh, they were miserable. I went
up with my mother and we thought, oh, we're going to have a
nice spa day and we're going to do this and just enjoy. And everything
wrong happened. I couldn't get my dress pressed. I found a company to
do it, but then they like tore it up, and well, we
were able to fix it, but it was raining every single day. We
lost our marriage license, and then I had a panic attack at the civil
ceremony. That's a whole other story, a story for another day. Yea,
the day of so the day before the wedding it was storming all day.
The day of the wedding it was beautiful. It got up to seventy
degrees, gorgeous sunny day. The day after the wedding it snowed, so
even the bad weather got canceled for our wedding. It's amazing how things lined
up. Everything lined up, including the weather. Yep. And if that's
not meant to be, I don't know what else. You know, what
more of a sign could there be? Absolutely so, I would say probably
the moral of that story is if something you just said it, if it's
something, is meant to be, then the universe will align itself. But
I think the best thing was we just received it as it was coming,
in gratitude. We didn't force it, We weren't angry, we didn't push
things, we didn't make people angry. We just allowed it. We surrendered
and we let it happen. And that was a beautiful thing. It sure was