Going to the... chapel? Part I: Selecting a season

Today D and I mailed off our third non-refundable deposit to our venue, so it seems a fitting time to start telling you the story of how we found the place... and why we would never have picked it under normal circumstances!

In chapter 1 of our tale, the date is March of 2008 and I'm on Spring Break. D and I weren't engaged yet, but were seriously discussing our timeline for engagement and marriage, and he'd begun his savings plan for my ring. It seemed as good a time as any to start the preliminaries of planning our wedding: setting a tentative date (summer post-graduation, 2010), figuring out what venues we wanted to look at, and getting some color and theme ideas. (After all, it was either that or study for finals!)

Between March and leading up to our September 2008 engagement, we'd determined that we'd get engaged in summer 2009, would have a summer 2010 wedding, that we wanted our ceremony and reception in one location, that we'd have a restaurant for a venue, that we wanted a beach wedding, and that our colors would be shades of blue and/or turquoise. I was inspired in the colors by these bridesmaid dresses:

(source)

Of the six "decisions" we made pre-engagement, we have stuck to exactly one. Can you guess which?