Hello!  I’m just popping in with a rare Saturday post to talk about the craziness that occurred yesterday.  It all started a couple months ago when I was Googling Denver weddings and saw one that took place at a public park.  I thought it was beautiful and felt so much more connected to it than I did to any of the other wedding venues we’d been looking at.  I also felt much more connected to the price 🙂  And so the idea of having our wedding ceremony at Cheesman Park was born.

A couple days later, my mom found an article taking about how people line up the night before Denver park permits are given out just to secure their wedding date at Denver’s most popular parks and we suddenly realized if we wanted our park we’d be doing that too.  While Cheesman isn’t thee most popular park to host a wedding in Denver, we didn’t want to chance it so we made a plan to be in line by 4:30 AM on Friday morning.  At 2 AM, we were both wide awake and decided to just head over.  Joey had driven by the line around 9:30 the night before and when we showed up around 3 AM there were probably less than 10 more people in line.

We brought chairs, blankets, snacks and many layers of clothes (standing in line for the KBCO Studio C CD release trained me well), but there were tents set up everywhere from the people who had camped out all night.  At 6 AM (you know, just three hours of sitting outside in the dark and cold), we were given tickets and ushered inside.  To wait for another SIX hours.  They took couples in groups of 15 to get their park permit and each group took longer and longer as more and more dates were taken.  Inside the waiting room, there was this crazy mix between camaraderie — all of us couples anxiously waiting for our turn and hoping the date we wanted was still open — and paranoia — all of us looking around the room, wondering if the person sitting next to us was going to book our park/date before we did.

Finally, our group was called and taken downstairs to the permit office.  At this point, we’d been told a bunch of dates that had been taken (mostly for two other parks), but we hadn’t head ours so we were pretty optimistic.  Which made it even harder when we were told our date was taken 😦  We had even taken a save the date picture at our engagement session last week hoping the date would work out so it was sad news, but luckily we were able to book a date a couple weeks earlier, which was just as good.  We really only had our hearts set on September 20th because it would be exactly a year from when we got engaged and it would’ve been kind of poetic but September 6th will still be perfect.  There was a couple who had gotten in line at 11 PM the night before and still ended up in our same group of 15.  The look on the bride’s face as the city official read off all the taken dates and she had to keep crossing them off her list until nothing was left was so sad, but they ended up with something that worked so it was a happy ending.

This probably all sounds slightly crazy and a lot of trouble to go through just for a park, but I actually had a lot of fun hanging out all day with Joey.  Plus it makes for a good story 🙂

This is the ticket they gave us just before we went inside.  Joey — and every other ticket holder — kept pulling it out of his pocket to make sure it was still there all day.  And then they no one ever looked at it.  I guess it makes for a good souvenir.