Category: Rehearsal Dinner

If I were to make a wish list of 100 decadent indulgences, certainly having my own award-winning French chef would be among them. If you love fine food as much as I do, and wouldn’t think of serving ordinary cuisine at your wedding, then hear this: The Villa Amodei, the newly available country estate in the hills above Camarillo, has hired their own in-house chef to personalize and customize your wedding menu.

Being an adventure junkie who loves all things untraditional, this is my idea of a really exciting rehearsal dinner on the town! Where do I sign up? Wait, 8 hours without a restroom. Hmmm. Probably not for me!

I remember the first time I saw Lake Tahoe—I had just moved to San Francisco for graduate school. My then-boyfriend invited me to a summer weekend at his family’s cabin on North Shore. As a city girl, I had precious little experience with life more than 10 minutes from a shopping mall, and was instantly enraptured with Tahoe’s quiet beauty and mountainous grandeur. Six months later, the same boyfriend took me on a spontaneous Tahoe jaunt for another first—my first time skiing. And even though at the end of the day the Bunny Hill still seemed like K2 to me, there were plenty of other joys to be had. I was amazed at how different and yet equally magnificent the blue lake was in its winter setting, and how crisp and clean the rustic terrain appeared with a dusting of snow. Hot chocolate just tasted better in the sweet mountain air, and surely Lake Tahoe had more stars in the sky than anywhere else on earth!

We all love “new”, right? New cars, new clothes, new guy (Ok, you’re probably past that one.) To prove our love of all things “new”, we’ve added a fresh crop of wedding, ceremony and rehearsal dinner locations to the Here Comes The Guide website. Be sure to check them out soon, before they’re all booked up! You might also want to visit our “New Stuff” page on a regular basis, where you’ll find updated lists of all our newest California wedding locations and vendors.

I’ll admit I’m a gardening junkie. My favorite part of any outdoor spring wedding is having the chance to explore a new wedding location with amazing gardens or flowers. If you love gardens as much as I do, you might want to think about celebrating this Earth Day in the Tri-Valley wine country (the other Napa).

On a recent weekend getaway to the Napa and Sonoma Wine Country area, my husband Phil and I decided to explore a different side of this famous wedding region. To me, an ideal wedding locale allows guests plenty of options for exploration, and the towns of Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, and Petaluma certainly kept us happily occupied.