Rehearsal Dinner

Things have settled down a little since our wedding and I’m going to slowly share the details! The logical place for me to begin was the rehearsal dinner. I’d touch on our massive Costco run to stock the house and the pool time with a giant flamingo but that’s not nearly as exciting.

In terms of location, we decided it would be fun to have our rehearsal dinner at Wilson Creek Manor that we rented in Temecula for our wedding party. All of our best friends were staying there so why not utilize the incredible space! Plus, the other options were a BJ’s or a Yardhouse and I wasn’t about to have our wedding festivities kick off at either of those. Don’t get me wrong, I love them but they have a time and occasion.

Since we got married on the 4th of July (and there was no red, white, and blue themed wedding in my plans), I really wanted to give everyone that backyard BBQ vibe that they’d be missing out on. I went with accents of red – checkered napkins and bud vases filled with a variety of red blooms. We had encouraged our guests to dress patriotically and they definitely did not disappoint. Lots of stars and stripes were in attendance!

Our hot sauce favors went perfectly with the theme! Matt and I LOVE hot sauce. We have no less than 10 different kinds open in our fridge at any given time and none of those are Cholula or Tapatio – we need more spice! Selecting the perfect sauce was quite the process. Matt took it more seriously than almost everything else to do with the wedding. We went through so many bags of chips during our series of taste testings. Finally, we settled on a garlic habanero sauce from Pepper Palace and it was quite the success! So many of our guests hoarded as many bottles as they could that we didn’t even have a bottle left for ourselves!

To put the finishing touch on the backyard BBQ vibe, I had Barbara from The Lettering Studio write out our menu in her beautiful Chloe calligraphy. You might remember her stunning writing from my bridal shower – I could just stare at it for hours! You’ll see more of her talents at work in the upcoming posts about the wedding day too.

We had such great speeches and heartfelt moments that Matt and I were so overwhelmed with emotion by the end of the night! We wrapped up the festivities with sparklers which turned out to be a huge hit. I believe there was even some singing of the national anthem at one point. We went to bed feeling grateful to have so many incredible family and friends who came to Temecula to celebrate with us!