Rehearsing your wedding ceremony prior to your wedding day is somewhat of a norm so that all those wonderful people you've asked to participate have a chance to get to town and settle in, learn where they stand, when they walk, etc. In addition, it gives me and Audrey a chance to walk through everything once since chances are we'll be somewhat nervous on the big day with everyone watching! After our wedding rehearsal, we will, as many couples do, be inviting the folks in the wedding to join us for dinner. My mom has very kindly and generously offered to host said dinner and has been helping search for a location for the rehearsal dinner nearly since our first trip to Charlottesville almost 7 months ago.
Mom has been incredibly patient with me and Audrey as we've danced around Charlottesville on a number of visits, scoping out possible rehearsal dinner locales. She and Isabel even travelled to Cville on their own time to try a few of the potential restaurants we were looking at for dinner. It's definitely been a process in its own right! And I'm not sure we could even put our finger on exactly what we had so much trouble with: some of the restaurants ended up being too small for our group; others were so unresponsive to our inquiries that we felt uncomfortable with their service level; a few offered less than optimal set ups/privacy; and one or two fell below expectations as far as food quality. Very troublesome indeed.
And then we got creative. Instead of looking at restaurants for our rehearsal dinner, we turned to good ol' UVA. No, not the Rotunda. Unfortunately, because it's being renovated, you can't rent out the Dome Room until 2014. But we did get to another iconic UVA building: Pavilion VII - the original building of The Lawn! For those who don't know, Thomas Jefferson was brilliant. In order to be able to build all 10 pavilions and the Rotunda, as he had originally intended, he decided to build them in sporadic order so that government officials would continue to provide him funding. So he started with Pavilion VII and hopped around the Lawn, eventually constructing the Rotunda later on. Pretty cool!
UVA has a special place in both mine and Audrey's heart, and we are SUPER excited to be able to have our rehearsal dinner right on Grounds! It may have taken a while to find the venue, but we are so excited about that my mom was willing to keep looking around and that we were able to reserve Pavilion VII! So on October 12, we'll rehearse the ceremony itself and then head on back to Pavilion VII for some delicious eats with some of our favorite people in the whole world at one of our favorite places in the whole world!
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