So our Muskegon trip started on Thursday.  The drive to Muskegon was less than awesome.  We lost track of how many accidents we almost got in.  It was a mess!  Lucky for us, Benn’s a pretty good driver

While we were driving through Holland, we saw the huge yellow wooden shoe and we both said at the same time, “I’ve been there!”  It’s at Dutch Village…loved it!  I’m pretty sure Benn and I will be back when we have a family lol.  That’s weird to think…

Anyway, so we safely made it to Muskegon, made it up to our room and walked into a room of smokey stench.  Keep in mind, the whole building has been smoke free since May.  We walked out on our deck and there was a cup of cigs.  Yuck.

The sign in the room said there’s a $200 fine for smoking in the room.  We took cup of cigs down to the front desk.  She said she ended up charging the people in the room before us $500.  That’s great for the hotel, but we had to deal with the smoke.  We got a bottle of febreeze…awesome.

Fortunately, the febreeze type stuff worked pretty well.  Our room was nice, but it just gave us the creeps.  It looked like we didn’t have clean linens.   The carpet was old and ripped.  It just wasn’t very comfortable feeling.

We did have an amazing view of Muskegon Lake!  We took lots of pictures!

I don’t remember what we did our first night there.  I think we went down to Lake Michigan at Pere Marquette Beach.  We took some awesome sunset pictures there!  We had an encounter with a cute little birdie; he was very chatty

We ate at Captain Jack’s on the beach for dinner.  Oh man, it was awesome!  They have really good tater tots with cheese.

Friday, we went to the craft show at the Muskegon Summer Celebration.  It was so much fun!  I love craft shows.  We stopped in a booth with canvas prints hanging up in the tent.  The artist, Kevin is from Michigan.  He had just a few prints in his tent, but I pretty much fell in love with all of them.

We bought two canvases!  One is of dune grass and some wooden fence.  The other is of a staircase on the beach.The artist is Kevin Blackmer.  He has a flickr account, you can check it out here if you’d like!

We also bought a few pictures from other booths.  I fell in love with a $100 staircase picture.  We ended up getting the smaller version for $45.  We also got a few 5x7s of staircases as well as a wine cellar.  I really love them.

We also got a few 3x5s of beach related pictures.  I can’t wait to get them on the walls!

For dinner that night we went to a stupid bar, had the worst service, but I had the most delicious pizza I’ve ever had.  lol  I told Benn not to tip our useless waitress but he gave her like 4 bucks.   The cook should have gotten all of that tip.  Ah well.  Life goes on.

And I must be going.  Tomorrow’s my birthday and the fam is coming up to go out to dinner and they’re coming over after.  Can’t wait!  Gotta get cleaning!

Mindy

We had such a beautiful room!  The ceiling was vaulted and circular.  The room was bright, clean, and comfortable.  We stayed from Monday to Thursday.  Amazingly, we were able to get up for breakfast every day.  I seem to enjoy breakfast…I ate so much!

Wednesday morning Benn decided he wanted cereal because he didn’t want the warm stuff they were serving; I think it was bread pudding.  I loved it, but anyway, he got his cereal and came back out to the porch to eat with me.  I decided I wanted me some cereal and he tells me that I’ll probably have to ask for more milk because he used it all for his cereal.

So I ask for some milk and he opens the little fridge and shows me that there’s still milk in there.  I said, “Oh, he told me he just used it all…” and Scott says, “He probably used the cream.”  Sure enough, the tea-pot-sized cream pourer was empty!

That was on expensive bowl of cereal Benjamin had!  The next morning they put out a much smaller cup of cream.  Haha!  How hilarious!

Monday we unpacked the car and sat on the beach for a few hours while the sun wasn’t so hot.  The waves were awesome!  Benn was a party pooper and totally didn’t join me in the waves.  Lame.

I kept myself company by digging a hole to the water and making little sand castles by dripping water and sand between my fingers…something my dad showed me and Eric when we were little.

We tried to get dinner around 10pm.  Turns out South Haven is a ghost town after 10pm on a Monday.  All restaurants stop serving food at 10 IF they’re even open on Monday.  We got Pizza Hut for dinner.  That’s right.  Pizza.  So we took that back to the room and watched The Food Network!  Our favorite channel that we can’t watch because we don’t have cable at the apartment.

Tuesday we walked around downtown and did a wine tasting at the Warner wine-tasting store near the Idler restaurant.  My mom got us a cool wine tasting book where we recorded things about each wine.  We got to taste 5 wines for free.

We ended up tasting a 6th wine for $5…and from that we bought a $45 bottle of delicious wine made from grapes frozen on the vine.  Luckily the wine was half off and only $45.  It’s a dessert wine, so I’ll have to find a recipe for a delicious cheesecake or something.  I don’t remember what the wine is right now…I’ll have to post it later.

After the wine tasting, we went to lunch at Captain Nemo’s.  It’s a small sit-down joint that has quite an ice cream menu.  When Katie and Devan and I went to the spa across the street from Nemo’s we had lunch catered in from Nemo’s with our spa package.  Well, it was delicious, so I knew I had to take Benn there during our honeymoon!  Our food was delicious.  Benn had a two hamburger patty sub sandwich, and I had a veggie grilled cheese.  Benn felt that a lot of their food was home made and hand sliced.  We’ll have to go back for their ice cream sometime!

Tuesday was also Grandpa Dale’s visitation.  We drove back into town for that.  Grandpa passed away early in the morning on our wedding day.  It was a sad morning, but I think we’re all happy that he’s back with Grandma.  We like to think that they were able to share in our special day with us

Tuesday night we went to dinner at Martell’s in Kalamazoo.  It used to be the Black Swan.  We went here to find out what they could do for us for a rehearsal dinner.  Since we didn’t choose them, we wanted to eat a dinner there sometime anyway.

Benn ordered a pork shank and I ordered prime rib and a glass of Merlot.  Both dishes were delicious!  Our waiter had a few recommendations for us; one was the wine which was so good with the prime rib, and the other was chef’s special, two giant raviolis with bruschetta on top (which is tomato and onion and basil maybe?)  The raviolis had 5 different kinds of cheese.  So good!

That was probably my favorite meal from the whole trip!  We missed the sunset driving back to South Haven, but I have a video of it.

Wednesday morning we had breakfast and went for a walk on the beach.  It was so relaxing.  The beach was pretty much empty.  There were bulldozers making the sand flat on the private beaches and some other kind of raking machine working on the sand.

We just sat and watched the water for a little while.  It was very romantic   We walked back to the room to get ready for the funeral.  Grandpa’s friend, Matt, gave a beautiful eulogy.  The service was given by Grandpa’s pastor.  Grandma and Grandpa’s headstone is very pretty and I loved that it had pink flowers in the flower holder.  I don’t know who put them there, but it made me think that it was something Grandma wanted and Grandpa was okay with pink because he loved her so much.

Wednesday evening we went back to South Haven to watch the sunset.  We made it to that one!  I had so much fun taking pictures with Scott’s DSLR camera.  Benn and I decided to use some of our wedding money to buy one.  I can not wait!  If you have any recommendataions, please let me know.

Thursday morning was our last morning in South Haven.  We rented a kayak across the street.  It was a double…thank goodness…turned out it was exhausting and I probably would have had trouble making it back to shore without Benjamin rowing with me.

We walked it down to the public beach right down the road from the rental place.  We could have rented wheels, but we didn’t really know what we would have done with them.   We actually could have done a lot of things with them…like taken them with us or put them in the car.

So we put it in the water.  I sat in front, Benjamin in back.  We had life jackets on and I brought my camera in my Vera Bradley ditty bag so as to not get it wet.  That bag is awesome, by the way.

I’ve never been kayaking.  Benn’s wanted to take me for a long time, and we finally got to go!  It was so much fun!  The water was pretty calm for us, which was nice.  We hit a few waves, but it was refreshing!  The rental was $25 for 4 hours and we were out there for a bout 2-2 1/2 hours.  It was tiring! I took a lot of breaks, while Benn paddled on.   Going back to shore was the hardest because the waves were trying to take us back out.  We made it though!

We stopped for lunch at Clementine’s.  We got onion rings and melted cheese with breadsticks.  Yum!  I got the Tugboat Annie steak of course, and Benn got a lunch special…which was some kind of sandwich.

After that we made our way up to Muskegon for our next interesting adventure.

More to come!

I think Benn will be working on a website for people to post pictures of the wedding so we can all share pictures with each other.

Mindy

The room we reserved was the Garden Room, which was in the separate house.  I called to ask about late check-ins and she found out we were staying there after the wedding and she upgraded us to a different room for free!  We ended up staying in Ruth’s Room.

They are currently renovating the house.  Our room was freshly painted with new linens.  It was so beautiful in the morning.  We woke up to bright sunshine in our yellow room both mornings.  It was relaxing and made us want to have an eastward facing room in our house so we can always wake up to sunshine!

Sunday morning we just barely made it to breakfast!  We thought it was from 9-11am but it was really from 8-10am.  We were so happy we made it to breakfast because Dana, the owner, made us apricot french toast.  It was amazing!  There was a layer of cream cheese, french toast, an apricot and apricot syrup.

Sunday we had a brunch and Benn and I opened presents.  Grandpa Johnson, Chad’s dad, made brisket for us, Grandma Hegedus made us cookies, Grandma Dee made us some salad and mom made the rest of the delicious spread.

It was nice being with our immediate families, but it was anything but relaxing.  We both were a little overwhelmed, but it was fun.  Scott and Stacy let us borrow their digital SLR camera to take on our honeymoon.  Oh my gosh, it’s so much fun!  I LOVE IT!  It’s such a blast!!  We’ve taken over 700 pictures!

Let’s see, Monday morning we had an omelet and a scone.  Yum!  Breakfast was so good! We packed the car and took a walk in the garden.  They’re still working on it, but it was pretty!

We loved every minute at the Stuart.   We learned a lot about the house, too.  It used to be owned by the Bartletts and then the Upjohns.  I took some pretty cool pics!  I’ll post them a little later.

Thanks for reading

Mindy

The ceremony was perfect.  We loved Reverend Marty’s messages.  I tried not to cry…we all know how that went.  It was so beautiful in every way!

The reception was amazing!  We loved the couples kisses!  We thought people were taking it pretty easy on us.

Funny thing about the cake…It was a beautiful cake, but we didn’t ask for blue piping…we asked for white; however, neither of us noticed this until the next day!  lol, it was pretty funny.  We had no clue how to do the cake cutting…so that was interesting.  It was probably the worst cake cutting in the history of cake cuttings!

The photobooth was a HUGE hit!  I’m so happy we spent the money on that; it was absolutely worth it.  We used Studio D2D for pretty much everything, including the photobooth.

We couldn’t have asked for a more  perfect day!

I can honestly say it was the happiest day of my life!

I’ll try to keep you updated on the honeymoon with pictures and things.  We  have a few busy days ahead.  We did find out that NOTHING but fast food and Pizza Hut is open past 1opm… if it’s open at all on Mondays in South Haven.

Thanks to everyone who helped with setup and take down of the wedding, and thanks to all of the guests who helped make our day memorable!  We can’t wait to see our pictures and video.

Mindy

When I walked in, everything was set up.  The tables and chairs were arranged in a circle.  Each spot had a scrapbook page, a rose and a piece of paper.  The punch was in the coolest punch dispenser I’ve ever seen, and the food was set out and ready to go.

My grandma made a beautiful poster with pictures of Benn and I before each dance, with a saying “On The Road to the Alter.”  It was so perfect!  I could tell it took her quite some time to put it together.  Did I mention it was beautiful and perfect in every way?

Katie put a little sash on me that said “Bride to Bling,” I thought that was cute.  I felt a little overwhelmed by the thought of the shower, especially since Benn wasn’t going to be there, but it looked amazing and I was ready to celebrate with my huge family!

Side story…

Starting with my senior class, Mattawan now requires all seniors to do a Senior Project in any field of choice.  You have to spend a certain amount of hours with a mentor, and by the end of the semester you present what you’ve learned over the course of the semester to your class and a panel of judges (who are usually parents.)

Well, Miss Sydney, my brother’s girlfriend, did cake decorating for her senior project, and let me tell you, she is fantastic!  She is currently working for a creamery in Kalamazoo/Portage decorating cakes when needed and serving ice cream.  Sydney made me a beautiful cake for my shower.  The fondant was shimmery and the cake was delicious!  It was so cute!

We played three games.  The first game, I wore an apron and grandma clothes-pinned 18 or so kitchen items on me (I had to carry a few) and I walked around the circle and people had to try to remember everything that was on me!  I think Janene won that game, and she got a little sewing kit as a prize.

The next game we played involved me dumping out my purse (which had been secretly stashed with other items…such as a tape measure and a tee, lol)  and whoever could match the most things won.  Stacy won that one, and Sierra pretty much called it; it was pretty funny.

The last game was probably my favorite.  Everyone was split into teams of 4.  They were given toilet paper, fake flowers from a lei, tape, a vine, and other accessories.  They had to use all the accessories along with toilet paper and tape to create a veil, and they had 20 minutes to do it.  One person on each team had to be the bride and model the veil.

Well guess who had to be the judge…ME!  Seriously!  How was I supposed to pick?!  The brides were Devan, Amanda, Grandma Hegedus, Aunt Nell, Sydney and Rachael.  They were all so cute!  I ended up choosing Grandma Hegedus because she looked the most like a bride!

After that, everyone got to have some cake and desserts while I opened gifts.  Ok, time for a secret.  So, after Benn and I finished our registries, I had kept checking online to see if anything had been purchased!  Well, we got a bit closer to the shower and I decided I wanted to be surprised…so I quit looking.  I’m so glad I did!  I loved being surprised!  lol  Now I know what NOT to do when Benn and I have our baby showers.  I know we will have multiple showers because I broke at least two ribbons   Do people have more than one shower?  I don’t even know.  Anyway….enough baby talk.

We are so thankful for all of the gifts, but I can’t thank everyone enough for coming.  I had a lot of fun, and it was great to see everyone else enjoying themselves.

Thanks to my mom, grandma, Devan, and Katie for helping set up everything, and thanks to everyone who helped us clean up!  Dave and Eric stopped by to help us and to bring carloads home, so thanks guys!  Sydney, thanks for the delicious cake!

Benn and I are so excited for the 26th to get here!  Friday I’m getting my tester hairdo done and this weekend we have more payments due.  My friend, Kira is throwing me a shower with my close friends this Saturday!  I can’t wait to see everyone again…it feels like it’s been forever.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a great weekend!  For Pictures, check them out here!  I don’t have all of them up, just some from one camera.  I’ll post more this weekend.

Mindy

We definitely didn’t come prepared for this meeting, but luckily she had everything taken care of for us!

She gave us a list of what the ceremony would consist of and the order that things would happen.  We changed a few things, but Benn and I were very pleased with how things would go.

She also gave us the “I do” paragraph and the vows she’d been saving for us…and of course it made me cry.  Benn cried a little, too.  They are perfect!

She talked about how it’s ok to cry and that the closer you get to the day you’ll find yourself crying on the way to the grocery store.  Well, I certainly have experienced a few of those spontaneous cries.  She said it will help me not feel so overwhelmed when the day comes.

I sure hope she’s right!

I am really looking forward to our ceremony.  I think it’s going to be exactly what we were hoping for.

In other news, this weekend Benn and I are having our bachelor and bachelorette parties!  I’m going to South Haven with my Maid of Honor (cousin Katie) and my bridesmaid Devan!  I can’t wait!  Benn is having a party at his cousin Kody’s house in Mattawan.

Next Sunday is my bridal shower, my friend, Kira, is having a shower for me the following weekend, and the next weekend is the BIG DAY!!!!

I can’t wait!

Thanks for reading,

Mindy

We started making a list of the people we need at the rehearsal dinner…I think I got to about 30 and was amazed there were that many people involved!  After finishing the list, we have 40 people coming to the rehearsal dinner! We limited it to immediate family, grandparents, bridal party, and other people involved in the wedding.

I stayed home from work one day to call around to restaurants in Kalamazoo, and I found a lot of options for the amount of people we’re having.   I found it extremely difficult to keep the price of plates between $10-$15.  Most places had prices between $25-$30 a plate, which ads up to a lot of money with 40 people.

Good news, we narrowed it down to two restaurants in the $10-$15 price range!

We went to look at Martell’s, which used to be the Black Swan.  They had a delicious looking sandwich menu, and we could have a room in the center of the restaurant to ourselves.

We also went into Friday’s to see what they had to offer.  They had a room that looked plenty big enough for a party of 40.  The music was quite loud when we walked into the restaurant, but you could hardly hear it in the party room, and he said we could even turn the music off if we wanted.  We decided this was our best option.

The best part is that the food is definitely in the price range!  We just want a room to ourselves and some good food!  We are very grateful that Jill and Chad have offered to pay for our dinner.  Benn and I are really looking forward to it!

Mindy

I have been using Wedding Channel throughout this whole process, and I’ve been pretty happy with it, but recently, they updated their guest list section (and the whole layout) of their website and I had to export my data into Excel and then import it back into their new guest list system.  I didn’t have a very easy time with that, which bummed me out, but I finally got the guest list and addresses into a list!  Yay!

So back to the seating chart.  Wedding Channel has a seating chart feature that’s new with this upgrade; however, I can’t use it yet because they’re not done working on it! (I’m not sure if they had one with the older version…I didn’t notice.)  Again, I was bummed out.

I did some searching though, and found WeddingWire.  I’m pretty sure I would have liked that site a lot better than Wedding Channel’s.  I started using their seating chart, and it’s pretty much the easiest thing in the world to use.  Well…I did have some trouble in the beginning, because you have to enter in a household name for each person, and it will seat everyone in that household together, but I didn’t realize that’s what it did, so I had to do some finagling with the names.  I decided to enter a household name for each person, so I could see who I was seating…otherwise it showed me the household name and not the name of the person.  (This probably makes no sense and it’s not very important.)

The important thing is I found an awesome tool that I wanted to share with you if you ever need to arrange a seating chart!  www.weddingwire.com!

In other exciting news, visits to my blog are up 108%!  Unfortunately, that’s not saying a whole lot, considering I got 25 visits from April 20-May20.  I’m looking forward to starting a personal blog after the wedding!

Thanks for reading!

If you haven’t RSVP’d yet, please do, so I can add you to the seating chart!!!   As I mentioned, we have 123 people coming, but we’re expecting around 250…so even if you’re not coming, RSVP!!  If there was a song about RSVPing, I’d be singing it right now! Haha

Mindy

We went back Saturday and met Luke, Eric, my mom, and Dave there so the guys could get measured. We decided on a coral color vest and tie for the groomsman with the black tux. I think it will look very nice with the girls’ dresses.

I liked the pinstriped tux Benn picked out, but I wanted to see him in the European style tux jacket.  It doesn’t have buttons.  It’s sleek and modern.  He tried it on with an ivory suit and tie.  He looks so handsome in that jacket! We decided to go with that exact vest, tie, and Benn decided on that jacket!  I was really happy he choose the jacket   I can’t wait for you all to see it!

For Dave, we decided on the same tux as the groomsman, but he’ll be in a black vest and tie. We were there for quite a long time, but Sly was very helpful! My mom was also very helpful. She had the guys trying jackets and vests on so we could compare them. So, thanks, Mom!

Luke, Eric, Benn and I went out to dinner at Red Robbin…or Round Robin as Benn kept calling it. Lol.  It was delicious, and we had some good laughs!

I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day!

Mindy

If you don’t already know, I have a growing addiction to Vera Bradley!  Vera Bradley is a company that offers purses, bags, and many other items of high quality in various patterns and styles.

I hadn’t even heard of the company until last year when I saw a lady carrying a very cute purse.  Benn said I should ask her, but I’m shy and didn’t want to ask, so he did.  She said she got it from the Dutton General Store and that it was a Vera Bradley bag.

Well, my swiss cheese memory could only remember that she got it from the Dutton General Store.  I did a google search for the name of the store and found the Vera Bradley name and was able to get to the website.  I looked over the website and loved everything!  I was so excited!  I picked out a bag to be my first Vera Bradley purchase and couldn’t wait for it to come in the mail!  It was the Villager in Java Blue.

Well, if getting the purse wasn’t exciting enough, it came in a white box with Vera Bradley printed on the top in a lime green.  The bag was wrapped in tissue paper with a Vera Bradley sticker holding the tissue paper ends together.  The receipt was slipped into a white envelope with Vera Bradley printed in lime green.

I was so impressed!  I love opening gifts from Vera!  It seriously makes my day.   I want to work for Vera Bradley so bad!  They have a photography position open, but I’ve only taken two photography classes…but I think I would love it.

Thursday to Sunday was the Vera Bradley Outlet Sale in Ft. Wayne, Indiana!  Oh my gosh, I’ve been looking forward to this day since I knew the sale existed!  When the notification email was sent to me I said, “I’m going!  Who’s coming with me!?”  Answer, my bff, Devan!

The Vera site had quite a few hotels listed in Ft. Wayne that all had very good prices if you were to mention Vera Bradley to them when you made reservations.  I had to wait a few weeks before I could make reservations, and the hotels were all booked!  We had to get a hotel in Kendallville, which was about a 40 minute drive from the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum.  (I found out today that my grandma went to see Elvis there!  How cool!)

I got up at 5:45am and we got in line at the Coliseum at 7:45am.  (I haven’t been up that early in MONTHS!)  It was sprinkling in the morning and when we turned into the parking lot there was a sea of umbrellas!  We waited in line for two hours before we finally got in.  It wasn’t too bad, plus it quit raining after about 10 minutes, so that was nice.

When we walked in, we were handed pink bags that we filled with whatever we wanted and we could sort it later.  I lost Devan at the first table!  I turned around and she was gone!  I did a 180 and couldn’t see her!  I figured she saw something she wanted, so I just looked through the table and went off to the side to give her a call, but then I saw her and we continued on our way.  They didn’t have very many new patterns, but I found a lot of stuff!

We had to go to another part of the building to checkout.  We were in shock when we saw the checkout line!  Totally unexpected!  Devan said, “Wow, Disney has shorter lines than this!”  It made me laugh.  It moved pretty quick though, and by that I mean the hour went by fast.  We slowly walked our way through the weaving line…saw a tiny baby who should NOT have been out in public, let alone among thousands of people, and we saw a lady walking barefoot.  Gross.  One lady and her husband had a large net that they put around at least 7 pink bags, and he just drug them with the net…it was crazy!

We left around 1pm and the parking lot was PACKED!  This year they had 65,000 people go through the sale in four days.  I thought they did a great job of organizing the sale and getting people in and out.  There were so many check out lanes, and each lane had three people.  One to itemize the purchases, one to ring up the items, and one to pack them.

I saved a whopping $600 on my 22 items.  It was awesome!  I will definitely be going next year, and now I have a better idea of how it works and they types of items to get as gifts.  I think my favorite purchase I made for myself was a Mailbag in Yellow Bird.

I was looking for ties for Benn and his groomsmen, but they didn’t have any.  When we got there they were out of quite a few items, like napkins, placemats, stockings, luggage, and when we walked in they announced they were out of large and small duffles.

Overall, it was an awesome road trip! Here are some pics!

Wedding plans are coming along nicely, we’re just making the final touches!  Don’t forget to RSVP!  We can’t wait to see you!

Thanks for reading,

Mindy