Reception Places
The next major thing has been finding a venue for our reception. This has been a particularily drawn out process. There has been so many factors, and they’re not all ironed out yet. But I will highlight the fun parts so far here 
Jim got a list of area hotels that had ballrooms in the RDU area. Then on Saturday (4/4/09) we were coming up from New Bern to Raleigh, and we got on the phone and called all the places and got preliminary information for each one. A lot of them had said to call back during the week because they didn’t have anyone on staff who could answer our questions.
So that following week was filled with phone calls about availability, seating capacities and the like. (Jim did a lot of this work for me since I was at work all day, everyday in New Bern. He’s the best!)
We narrowed it down to a few hotels; and then Jim, Elaine, and I went to about 4-5 hotels in one day (4/11/09) just to check out ballrooms and talk to people. It was a great bonding experience that we had fun with Kudos to Elaine for noting the scuff marks on the couches and walls in certain hotels 
FYI it helps to have a 3rd or 4th person who can scope out the place while you and the fiance are looking at the bigger things and talking to staff.
We picked our final choices, in order of priority and then went home to talk to my parents. They seemed to be fine with whatever we had chosen, and actually pretty excited about our first pick. 
Since then we’ve been doing our research and trying to hash out the contract… will definitely update here once everything is set in stone. =)
