Our Wedding Recap
The Our Wedding Story contest was created to give all 417-land grooms- and brides-to-be a chance to have their wedding featured in 417 Bride. Nearly 30 couples decided to take a chance, and a team of judges narrowed the list to five finalists. Next we let you all vote for your favorite, and Bethany LaCavera and Brandon Dhondt won the contest.
It was raining when we woke up on July 11. We weren’http://www.417mag.com/admin/pages/Publishing/index.php?mid=1334&view=new_article&itm=0&issueid=1709t sure if we were even going to be able to have our wedding outside as planned. But it was still an absolutely beautiful day, despite the cloudy skies. Fortunately, we were blessed and the rain stopped. The early showers were actually a good thing—they left us with a slightly cooler day, and the overcast sky was better for pictures.
Everyone kept asking us if we were nervous, and our answers were always a confident “No.” We were nothing but excited. The ceremony went great, with a few minor hiccups. The wedding area turned out to be more beautiful than we had planned, just like the images we had in our heads. Located right in the middle of a bunch of trees, we made an area covered in wood chips. We built an arbor from fresh-sawn red cedar, which is where we stood with the pastor. The wedding party stood on the sides of the arbor, and there were more than 200 chairs that turned the beautiful nature scene into a wedding chapel.
The first sight of Bethany in her wedding dress nearly brought tears to my eyes. She looked stunning, amazing, pinch-me-I'm-dreaming beautiful! There were fireworks for everyone else as we kissed for our first time as husband and wife, but for me the fireworks came when I saw Bethany.
After the ceremony, we had our reception at Highland Place. The food was catered by Dixie's Hospitality in Branson. Everything tasted great, and luckily Bethany and I were able to eat (since we got to the reception about an hour and a half after everyone else). We had three main dishes, and each was as tasty as the next.
As we have stated before, there were fireworks! We ended the reception with an array of aerial pyrotechnics. We couldn't have asked for any better of a day. Anything that didn't go as planned simply left us with more memories of the day and how we overcame them with a smile.
