Real Wedding: Vanessa and Dean

I'm going to bring out a wedding that took place 3 summers ago, and I want to do this because it is such an unbelievable and wonderful story.  First let me give you some background.  Vanessa and Dean are a great couple from Oregon, and they wanted to get married here in Sun Valley, over Labor Day weekend.  Vanessa has been visiting here for years with her parents, so this place had very special meaning to her.  Now this wedding was going to be a big one, potentially 500 people. 

Okay so that all sounds wonderful and totally doable.  Now here is the problem......about mid August, in the middle of a very dry summer, we had some lightning strike, in an area of our mountains called Castle Rock.  This went from a small fire to a huge fire very fast, so big almost the entire town had to evacuate.  Let me just show you what I am talking about, our talented wedding photographer Thia Konig captured everything perfectly....

So you can only imagine the bride and groom were a little nervous. In a nut shell here is what happened.  The wedding location got evacuated two times, at which point we ran out of places to put a huge tent.  So the Thursday before the wedding, Vanessa and Dean decided to call off the big wedding and just have a very small wedding for the people who had already arrived, about 30 people.  We put up the tents in her mother's front yard and hoped for the best.

Now since we had decided to do this 2 days before the wedding, we were sitting on food and flowers for about 400 people.  In an unbelievable act of generosity, Paul, Vanessa's father, asked Judith McQueen, the caterer to feed all of the local firemen.  Let me tell you how happy those firemen were for an unbelievable meal.

The morning of the wedding arrived, and by some miracle the wind had shifted allowing us to have blue sky for the first time in almost 3 weeks.  Vanessa and Dean wed in the backyard and had one of the most touching and memorable weddings of my career.  I have to say that this wedding would never have happened without the hard work of That's Entertainment, Judith McQueen and Thia Konig.  And of course to all the firefighters who came in from across the country to save our town, we thank you!!  And now for the wedding...

For the entire incredible story and even more pictures check out the article from Sun Valley Magazine.