Picking the wedding venue

As I get closer to my trip to Las Vegas in December I am working on a number of items I want to research while I am in town. I have wedding photographer interview, makeup artist test appointments, I want to tour some of the hotel suites and visit a couple of locations to verify they are OK with pictures being taken on site. The option with the most possible choices, I think, will be where to hold the ceremony. A search of Las Vegas wedding brings up countless options. Some are specific chapels others are a wedding planning service with access to any number of chapels in town.

I will actually being looking for two ceremonies. One for our first wedding next April and the second is for the special I get to be the bride wedding. We don't want them to be the same thing with where we just wear different outfits. We would like them to have their own identity and not be some stale boring thing.

From what I have seen we have a few choices to make. The first option we have is an inside (chapel) wedding or and outdoor (garden) wedding. Depending on what you are willing to spend you can have a simple gazebo that has room for up to ten guests or you can rent large garden areas or poolside at Ceasars palace or the Flamingo. My favorite outdoor option is on the pirate ship at Treasure Island but I'm not dropping three grand to do it. For indoor chapels you have the same small number of guest options to seating for hundreds. We are going with a small wedding so a smaller venue will work out just fine.

Next comes the Elvis factor. I think we want Elvis in some capacity at both weddings. My fiance has expressed an interest at having Elvis actually perform the wedding ceremony. This would be fine but finding an Elvis who is also able to legally perform the service is difficult. This one might have to wait for wedding number two. There is also the cheese factor here. There are some places offing special Elvis vows, that kind of scares me a little. We also would prefer a young Elvis over a fat jumpsuit Elvis. One other special request from my fiance is asking if we can get Elvis to do one Elvis Costello song at the first wedding. His music was very popular with a number of our friends.

COming up with an actual cost can be difficult too. Apparently there is lots of tipping involved. Tipping the officiant, tipping the limo driver, tipping Elivs, tipping the photographer. Most of the predefined ceremonies show a cost but they also include the use of the limo (tip), ten pictures from the ceremony (tip) and an officiant (tip), Elvis cost extra and he also gets a tip.

I haven't found too many places that have an ala carte style menu. I don't think we will need a limo for wedding number one and I want to rent an outside limo for wedding number two since I want to drive around town for photos afterwards. Pictures might be OK for wedding number one not that we couldn't have our friends take some photos. But for wedding number two I will have my own photographer. I'm not even sure they allow outside photographers in the chapels. There's something to ask,

There are also little add ons you can get: Flowers, unity candle, special music, etc. We also have to decide if we want to go on or off the strip.

So during my dress up weekend I will be doing plenty of research online and consulting with my bride/husband to be on what we are really looking for in a wedding venue. Thanks for reading and I will have another post next weekend or early in the following week explaining my dressing weekend and what I plan to do for it. Including Twitter entries as I prepare.