Wedding 2.0

9200 Carmel Valley Road Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA 93923

As you're probably all aware, this wedding was originally intended to take place on October 10, 2020. As the country started locking down in mid-March of that year, we thought to ourselves, "Thank goodness our wedding isn't until October! This will all be over by then..." Obviously that didn't happen. Although we were able to push back the larger celebration by a year, we were still eager to make it legal on our originally planned date. So we decided to go to Yosemite, a special place to us and where we got engaged, to hike up to Glacier Point and marry in a tiny private ceremony. Once again, 2020 had other plans. Not only was getting a marriage license in California nearly impossible due to COVID effectively shutting down city halls, but by mid-September, California was in the midst of its worst wildfire season to date. Yosemite was so heavily covered in smoke that it closed to all visitors. We also watched in fear as the Holly Farm, our wedding venue, was threatened for weeks with evacuation. Thankfully it escaped unscathed. At that point we were determined to get married, if nothing else because we just needed something to celebrate. But with only couple of weeks left before the date, where could we go to tie the knot at the last minute...? ...VEGAS, BABY! By October the pandemic seemed to be easing up a bit, and we'd heard from friends that Vegas was less crowded thanks to COVID. This turned out to be completely untrue, but we tried our best to be careful, and finally said "I do" in front of the Bellagio fountains. And Gretchen will forever cherish the memory of her father-in-law driving her to CVS the morning of her wedding for her mandatory COVID test.