Month of May, Memorial Day Weekend & Floral Frenzy!

May was going by like a whirlwind, and we had a lot on our plate for Memorial Day weekend. To begin, we were excited to be in town this year for one of my besties' birthday (and bridesmaid), Katie O'Shea. We had a great time at her fav Cuban restaurant, followed by a night on the town. The next day, we had plans to drive to Sarasota bright and early for vendor appointments, then finish the weekend off with a side job to help with the wedding fund.

Happy Bday to Katie!

Around Memorial Day weekend, we started picking up the pace and knew we needed to begin exploring florists. We kept hearing the name "Flowers by Fudgie" (isn't that a cute name?) from all of our other vendors as a recommendation. They were also on the list of popular choices from Ringling, and as we mentioned in an earlier post, this was the florist we saw setting up another wedding on our last visit to the venue. Definitely someone we wanted to explore. We actually had a chance to briefly chat with them and felt they would do a great job, but we wanted to setup a formal appointment. With my annoying tendencies, I also felt it necessary to make a few other appointments with different florists to explore options....you know, confuse the situation of course. :) That put us for a loooong weekend of appointments.

When we go to Sarasota, we always try to book as many appointments as possible to maximize our time there. Exhausting? Yes. This trip was no exception with three back-to-back florist appointments, meeting with our caterer Mattison's, our coordinator at our venue, and the plan to explore hotels and rehearsal dinner locations...all in about 1 1/2 days including traveling there and back.

I won't bore you with details of our trip, but I will say that although we liked all of the florists, we decided to go with our gut choice of Flowers by Fudgie! Our contact Becki was very helpful, and we scheduled a followup trip so we could make final decision on design direction. Things were really starting to come together!

THE CRAWFISH PARTY

As I mentioned earlier, we had a gig to get to the next evening. There is a gigantic annual party in Orlando called the Crawfish Party which is comprised of beer, crawfish, music, and a TON of people running around outside in the heat. It's awesome. Anyways, a group of our friends founded/works the event every year, and Gary and I luckily got to join in for our first time. Besides being fun, it was a great way to earn extra cash for the wedding!

We had the job of selling t-shirts to intoxicated people by the port-a-potties, and we were setup on prime people watching real estate. At one point, there was even a guy who climbed up the port-a-potties and proceeded to run across the top of every one, jumping off at the end with his "tail between his legs" and hands extended for the cops waiting. Just one of the interesting things that evening!

Although I don't have any visuals of us at the event, I found a random video on YouTube which captures the vibe of what you'll find at the Crawfish Party. Check it out!

Anyways, that's my story. We'll be cranking out a few more posts soon in an attempt to catch up to real-time. :)

<3

Krissy