Reason #1 why wedding planning in exile is tricky

You can't visit reception sites without buying plane tickets.

Econo Boy and I are both planners. Last-minute, free-wheeling, spontaneous ... none of these are adjectives that would ever be used to describe us. As far as the wedding goes, frankly, we would like nothing better than to have booked the venue, the caterer, the photographer, and the florist within a week of our engagement. So what if we're more than a year away from the wedding? It never hurts to have all of your ducks in a row.

But we're also big believers in "research expensive things before you pay for them." The thought of selecting a venue based only on carefully chosen website or brochure photos is not one we love. Our parents all live in the Denver area and are happy to check out sites for us, but I don't think we could ever persuade ourselves to write that big fat check without laying eyes on the place ourselves.

We will both be in Denver at the end of July and have high hopes for being able to at the very least find our ceremony and reception sites. But I'm a bit nervous. On a recent weekend trip to Colorado, Econo Boy, my mom, and his parents visited a few reception sites. One of them, a promising-looking historic manor, is already booked for all but two Saturdays next summer!

Econo Boy didn't love this site (their carefully shot photos did not reveal the highway just to the right of the outdoor ceremony site), so it's not as if we've lost out on anything amazing, but it worries me that things are already booked more than a year in advance. So much for thinking 14 months is a ton of time! Yeesh.