How to have a wedding that isn't terrible

To elaborate on my last post, here is a quick sketch of the way we are planning ours to go down:

Family (less than 30) gather at the 29 Palms Inn a day or two beforehand. It's a little village of adobe bungalows and woodframe cottages in the high desert. We've reserved a large portion of it so far; ours (Irene's historic adobe) has a big old back courtyard for gatherings. We'll party and have fires outside and drink and enjoy each other's company and listen to music.

Cactus everywhere.

A few siblings may plan daytrips to Joshua Tree or the Mojave Nat'l Preserve, which is nearby.

Our brief and secular ceremony will be at the spot of an abandoned townsite in the Mojave Desert called Bagdad.

(You may have seen this movie...the namesake still exists and operates, but it is located down the road in Newberry Springs.)

I drove out to Bagdad yesterday to survey the site; our friend Mike is going to be performing the ceremony. He is also going to be building the platform that we erect on the site for the ceremony, and doing any number of other awesome things.

The site is festively littered with old broken colored glass, which glitters in the sun. I have several sacks of it at home for mosaics.

I am designing an art piece for the platform to act as a backdrop or arch or posts or something along those lines.

Here is the site:




It's hard not to squint in the sun:



We'll have an RV out there, and booze of course, and briefly exchange vows. (The legal will have been taken care of prior.) Then we head back to Pasadena and have a nice dinner somewhere.

I'm designing anything that needs to be designed with the harsh, severe beauty of the desert in mind.

The golden hour on the National Trails Highway makes everything lovely: