Scenes From a Fall Wedding

Since it's the middle of dreaded winter, I've been finding it pleasant to daydream about things I was doing when it was a little bit warmer out. In the fall, N and I were invited to the wedding of some very-cool-but-not-that-close friends of ours. The reason I mention the not-that-close part is because the wedding was smack dab in the middle of the beautiful Great Smoky Mountains, a whole, thrilling 9.5 hour drive away from where we live. We spent weeks agonizing over whether to go, and how important was it really that we were there, and texting admiring pictures of the venue and the Smokies to each other before finally deciding to go (well after the RSVP date...because we are bad people, but like I said, these friends are very cool and chill and do not hate us...to our knowledge). Here they are being totally adorable for your viewing pleasure:
Having never driven through this part of the country, I was a little worried we were looking at 9 hours of farmland, but turns out...we headed straight through the Cumberland Gap National Forest (which I only know exists because of the Wagon Wheel song, being from the west). It was stunning and even the pouring rain could ruin the drive completely. P.S. Feel free to complain about the crack running through these pictures courtesy of N still not having gotten his windshield fixed even though it's been this way for like 3 years.

Before the wedding, we ended up having several hours to ourselves to do a little exploring, and weather be damned, we took advantage of it! Fall was just beginning to show it's colors in the mountains and we managed to find this lovely little waterfall for a quick hike.
Yes, this one was taken by balancing on rocks in the center of the creek.

And then, there was the wedding itself. I can't say enough about how elegant and quaint and rustic and just plain ADORABLE this wedding was. Also, they had a drone that, while drowning out part of their vows to the audience, took amazing aerial panoramic pictures of the ceremony. The reception was in a half indoor-half outdoor rustic barn/lodge-type thing, which was equally gorgeous. Also, the reception had cocktail appetizers and there was much dancing and a photo booth, so I was a happy lady.

I've never given a whole lot of thought to what I want my wedding to be like (mostly because the idea of planning that gives me the beginnings-of-panic-attack feeling if I think about it for too long), but I'm pretty sure that expensive rustic mountain wedding has recently shot to the top of my list.