This post has been a long time coming! If you’re new here I am going to backtrack a little bit. Zachary and I met move in weekend of college in the summer of 2011. We got engaged a year after we graduated in the summer of 2016, and we recently got married on September 15, 2018! Let me save you from doing that math, we have now been together for seven years! When we got engaged we weren’t in a rush to get married as our priorities were working towards personal and professional goals. Flash forward to our first trip to Charleston, South Carolina during Memorial Day Weekend 2017. We absolutely fell in love with the city and decided that we wanted to get married there. So, we went back the following February to book a venue. We picked a random date in September and our dream venue was available! We thought summer would be too hot, but we didn’t want it to be cold, so September seemed perfect!
We had the entire thing planned out, and had made a couple trips up to SC to meet with vendors for walk throughs, etc. We were so excited to have a north meets south destination wedding with all of our family and friends in our favorite city. There weren’t many guests that had been before so most people were making a long weekend out of it. Some were even coming for a week! I thought everything was going to be perfect!
The entire time it was in the back of my mind that our date was during hurricane season, but since we had dealt with Irma the year prior I just didn’t think lightning would strike twice in the same place. As we got closer, I was watching the tropics like an insane person. There were a few storms that popped up, but everyone told me not to worry so I tried not to think about what could happen.
Then as we got closer the spaghetti models were all pointing towards the Carolinas for the weekend of our wedding. So at this point it was a real threat and the news stations were reporting on it. I told myself that it would all work out and everything would go on as planned. Although, we just might have to bring some hurricane supplies to ride out the storm in Charleston. We were literally packing all of our hurricane supplies from the year prior. We were even considering bringing gas with us as we had heard that some places in between Tampa and SC were out of gas already from people evacuating.
I had been in contact with the venue and our wedding planner who all assured me at this point (about a week out) that we could have everything go on as we planned. My family was starting to get a little panicky about heading towards a hurricane, but most were prepared to rally and weather Hurricane Florence with us in SC. Sunday night I packed up all of our stuff in rubbermaid tubs and was ready to go!
On Monday, I had a call after work with our wedding planner. She told me that there was a mandatory evacuation in place for Charleston due to the storm and all the government offices would be closed for the week. I was driving home when I got this call and up until this point I hadn’t lost my cool, but the reality of it hit me in that moment and I just started bawling. I called Zachary and told him that at this point there was not only no way for us to get to Charleston (they reversed all the lanes), but even if we got there somehow we still needed a marriage license which we couldn’t get. So our options became either reschedule it for Charleston on another date or move it to another city for the same date. We both agreed that the only thing that mattered was that we got married on September 15, 2018 as planned. Therefore, we decided to take on moving an entire wedding to a new city in four days. We thought worst case scenario we’d just do it all at our house.
Honestly, I was only sad about it for a few minutes when I initially realized all of our planning was out the window due to something completely out of our control. I made peace with it and redirected all of my attention to our Tampa wedding.
The first family members were flying in on Tuesday, so we started calling everyone to tell them to reroute their flights to Tampa (at this point everyone’s hotels and car rentals in Charleston had been cancelled and people were panicking!) and we would figure it out. We also started contacting all of our networks here in Tampa because we needed all new venues and vendors. Within hours of putting our feelers out for help, we were contacted by local news stations, local businesses, and venues letting us know they had availability. I am truly grateful for how quickly Tampa rallied around us to make our wedding happen in four days.
Our guests started arriving Tuesday and we immediately put everyone to work going out to buy candles, ordering rentals, as well as cleaning our house for the 80 people flying into town. The days leading up to September 15th were all a blur. By some miracle, we secured the perfect venue, The Orlo. Meanwhile, Salt Block Hospitality coordinated all the food, staffing, tables, chairs, DJ, and more! I seriously cannot thank them enough for saving us! Z’s parents work in the flower industry and they had all new flowers shipped in overnight and his mom arranged everything in two days! Luckily, our photographer was coming from Knoxville so she was able to come to Tampa fairly easily along with my makeup artist who was coming from Tampa anyways! My friend Kelly and I went to World Market and bought all of their hurricane glasses, a ton of candles, had all of our programs reprinted and found the ribbon for the bouquets (she’s an angel). There was a list in the kitchen that if someone needed a job they could just look at it and take one. It was seriously a team effort and everyone that flew in got put to work. We had friends stringing lights in our backyard in 90 degree heat just hours before the rehearsal dinner. My brother was mowing our lawn and fixing a board on our deck. People were driving all over Tampa picking things up for us. My childhood best friend from Chicago who was originally a wedding guest became our day of coordinator and she executed my vision perfectly!! It was nothing short of incredible.
Originally, we were planning to get married at Blessed Sacrament Church with a reception at The Planters Inn in Charleston. We ended up at our home parish in Tampa, St. Lawrence Catholic Church and our reception was at The Orlo. I will list out all of the vendors we used for our Tampa wedding in tomorrow’s post! Here are some photos of the church we got married in and our venue! The rest of our wedding photos will be up on the blog Thursday!
All photos by Rachel Fugate
