Where's the party at?!

I moved to south Texas less than a year before I got engaged. I knew literally nothing about wedding reception locations in the area. I'd been to one wedding here, in a hotel ballroom, and a quick e-mail confirmed that there was no freaking way we could afford to do that. Catering minimum? No thank you.

Mr. Hyena and I talked about all the things we wanted in a reception venue, including having it indoors (outdoors in May in Texas = unpredictable), not wanting to pay for a lot of additional rentals, wanting the venue to allow alcohol and wanting to be able to book it as soon as possible (I mayyy have mentioned that I tend toward the anxious, and I didn't want to worry longer than necessary).

I jumped online to visit my dear friend, Google, and came up with the following options. We visited all of them, and unfortunately I took no pictures ... so you'll have to just look at the ones on each place's Web site.

• Downtown 202, Bryan — This was the first place we visited, one weekend while Hyena Sis was in town. Looooooved it! Rustic brick walls, gorgeous chandeliers, but a little pricier than we had planned for. Also, they wouldn't let us book more than a year in advance. I was terrified that someone else would swoop in and book it first, so we kept looking.

(sorry for the low-quality pics, I didn't get any of my own! image source here)

• The Veranda, College Station — Cute little reception area out in the middle of nowhere. There was an outdoor arch on a deck over a little pond, which would have been perfect for someone who was going to have a much smaller wedding than ours. It was really cute, and the hardwood floors were really nice, but there were only two toilets in the whole place. For 150 guests, that didn't seem sufficient, and it would have cost a big chunk of our budget to rent additional ones.

(images from here)

• Brazos Cotton Exchange, Bryan — I saw a lot of potential in this one, and I liked all the things I would have been able to do with the space. It was on the third floor of a building in the downtown district, had huge windows and few decoration restrictions. The downside: extremely small "dance floor" (which was actually more like an aisle for walking), so we would have to rent a dance floor, which, again, would take up a good chunk of budget $$.

(images from here)

• Royalty Pecan Farms, Caldwell — A little out of the way, but an adorable rustic indoor/outdoor venue. We liked this one, since there was room to fit everyone inside in case of inclement weather, but if the weather was nice then we could spread people out all over the lawn. It even had a cute arch to get married under! It came with all rental items and was within our budget, but they wanted to charge an arm and a leg for alcohol and food.*

(images from here)

So which one did we choose? Drum roll, please ...

Downtown 202! Mom Hyena came down to visit for the weekend to help me complete some wedding tasks, and I took her out to our final two contenders (the other was the pecan farm). She loved Downtown 202 and after talking about it for a quick sec, we were ready to put down the deposit right then and there! Only problem ...

Remember when I said they weren't booking more than a year in advance? Yeahhhhhh. We told the lady who owns Downtown 202 that we had just come from the pecan farm, and that they had said they could only hold our date for another week since several other couples had inquired about it. We didn't want to lose both venues because we couldn't commit this far in advance! So she allowed us to book it two months earlier than she originally was going to allow! We were so pumped. And can you imagine if they had let someone else do this while we were waiting for exactly a year in advance??

Did anyone else miss out on a venue they loved because of booking restrictions?

*This is, of course, relative. It was just more expensive than this little cheapskate wanted to spend! Thirty dollars per bottle of wine? Um, I'm a six-dollar-bottle type of girl.