Out of State Wedding

One of Corey's track friends from college got married last weekend and we decided to make the trek down to Conway to see him get married.  Since we're on a budget, we wanted to stay as close to our goal of $150 as possible.

Corey likes to look up Man vs. Food locations whenever we head somewhere new and ended up falling in love with this place called Cotham Mercantile.  It was down some random highway and our GPS got very confused.  If we hadn't seen the front of the building in the MVF episode, we would probably still be out there looking for it.  They're known for their Hubcap burgers.  It's basically a burger the size of your entire plate.  Or your husband's head.  He was very happy.

We booked it back to Conway to get ready and on the way to the wedding.  Their processional music was an instrumental version of Skinny Love. My heart was a little broken to find out that Bon Iver would be performing at the Little Rock River Walk on Sunday evening and we had to head home to get me back to work on Monday.  Sigh.  We were so close.

As their slideshow was going on before the wedding, it was wonderful to see them grow up together essentially through their photos.  Nine years together is astonishing.  Corey and I are exactly one month shy of our first married anniversary in this photo.  Why yes, I am drinking out of a mason jar in Arkansas too.

The happy couples.  Check out my sweet ankle brace accessory.  I'm just about done with that piece of healing from last week's tumble.

Ok, back to the budget portion.  The hotel that they had the group rate at was $110 a night.  We went ahead and used our AAA discount to stay in a hotel that was less than half of that rate.We decided to  not buy anything new to wear for the wedding.  I found a dress that I had worn to my graduation in 2009 hanging in a suit bag in our spare closet.  Win!  We homemade a gift and gassed up the car.  We could have cut corners on the eating out by not going to the Man vs. Food restaurant but we have no plans to go back to Little Rock in the future.  We just considered it in our normal restaurant visit for the month so we're not upset with ourselves budget wise.

Our final total was $185.65.  By my calculations, we saved $134 from what we would have done if we weren't keeping a huge eye on our finances.  I'm proud of us.  This is the first time we've gone out and done something big since we started getting super serious on our budget.  It just shows that we can still enjoy ourselves and win.