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If you had asked me to describe my dream wedding before I got engaged, I probably would have shrugged and said I hadn’t really thought about it. But that would have been a lie.
The truth is I had always imagined a picturesque ceremony at a white-washed historic inn on the Chesapeake Bay, complete with sailing off into the sunset on an old wooden sailboat while a Great Blue Heron flies overhead. Imagine the waterfront wedding in Wedding Crashers where Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn’s characters meet the Cleary sisters. That’s what I thought I wanted.
Then I got engaged.As soon as my fiancé Rob and I announced our engagement, everyone wanted to know where and when we would be getting married. In Maryland, where I grew up? In New Orleans, where he and I live together? Or maybe a destination wedding? Suddenly I realized the who was actually easier to figure out than the when and where.
What did “green” mean to me, and how did this figure into our location?
Early on I realized that to me “green” meant literally the color green – I wanted some part of my wedding to be outdoors and nature to be the décor. It also meant limiting my consumption of goods and the wedding’s carbon footprint.
Where will the wedding be? A destination, Maryland, or New Orleans?
My fiancé Rob and I love to travel so the idea of a destination wedding appealed to us at first. However, after some discussion we felt having 150 guests traveling to celebrate with us did not feel right. It created a large carbon footprint with the travel and need for rental cars and other transportation at the destination. Also, it would be expensive for friends and family during an economically difficult time.
So although I had always dreamed of a wedding at a place like the Inn at Perry Cabin, which was featured in Wedding Crashers, I realized it did not fit in with the reality of a wedding I wanted. Yes, it was in Maryland, but it still qualified as a destination wedding because it was more than 3 hours away from where my family and friends lived.
However, that didn’t rule out Maryland completely. There were still plenty of waterfront locations within driving distance of my parents’ homes. I narrowed it down to three locations, two of which were particularly “green:”
Rob and I flew to Maryland to see them and both of us loved the private beach and laid back feel of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s headquarters. So we returned to our home in New Orleans thinking Maryland was going to be our wedding location.
Then my Mama started calling from Maryland about caterers and florists and dresses and hairstylists. There were so many details I hadn’t thought about that were harder to deal with a time-zone away. So Rob and I started thinking again. We finally took the advice given to us weeks before, and looked at our guest list. More than fifty percent are from New Orleans. Less than twenty percent are from my home state of Maryland. That’s simple enough math. I don’t need to compare carbon footprints or travel price plans to know it’s the greenest choice. And it only took two months of research, one trip to Maryland, and several dozen phone calls, for Rob and I to decide to get married at home in New Orleans.
Sidebar: The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System is an internationally recognized green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.
Written By Veronica Del Bianco
Veronica Del Bianco currently resides in the heart of New Orleans just a street car ride from the French Quarter. And despite her pick-up truck driving fiancé, her love for po' boys, and her devoted hound dog, Veronica cannot hide the fact that she is, indeed, a transplanted "yankee" from the Mid-Atlantic. She is currently planning her own green wedding.
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