Wedding details

Welcome to friends and family! Thank you for visiting Noah and Florence's wedding blog. Here are the details promised:

Date and time
Sunday, October 6, 2013
3:00pm

Address
22508 Griffith Drive
Gaithersburg, Maryland 20882
See address in Google Maps

Location
This is an outdoor ceremony and reception at the private residence of family friends of the Bastiens. They have graciously opened their home and backyard to us for the day. The average temperature in Gaithersburg on October 6 is a high of 68 degrees and a low of 51 degrees (Fahrenheit). The wedding is on rain or shine!

How to RSVP
For guests in the United States: fill out the included reply card and drop it in the nearest mailbox. The reverse is addressed and stamped as a postcard, so it will make its way back to us.

For guests outside the United States: fill out the included reply card and take it to your local post office to mail it back to us. I'm sorry that we weren't able to stamp these - international reply postage is difficult.

Attire
Not too formal. Suits or formal dresses are certainly not required - unless you really want to wear one. We won't stand in your way.

Travel and accommodations
The nearest airports are Baltimore-Washington International (about 45 minutes away by car), Reagan National (50 minutes), and Dulles International (50 minutes).

The nearest Amtrak stations are Union Station in Washington, DC (1 hour) and the BWI train station (50 minutes).

Gaithersburg is also served by the Washington Metro at Shady Grove station, although you will need a car to get from there to the wedding location (20 minutes).

These are some of the hotels and B&Bs in the Westminster area:
Best Western, Westminster
Yellow Turtle Inn, New Windsor
Atlee House, New Windsor
Hampton Inn, Owings Mills
Hyatt Place, Owings Mills

New Windsor is 10 minutes from our home in Westminster and 45 minutes from the wedding location. Owings Mills is 20 minutes from Westminster and 45 minutes from the wedding location. The Best Western is about 50 minutes from the wedding location.

If you would like instead to stay closer to the wedding site, there is a number of hotels in downtown Gaithersburg, which is 20-25 minutes from the wedding location and an hour from Westminster.

Registry
The registry is located here.

Questions?
Please leave a comment with your question and name. We'll answer by phone or email as soon as we can!

Ride sharing forum
Noah and Florence's Wedding

For those that missed the original announcement

Below is our original Facebook engagement announcement, for those that missed it or don't have Facebook. It should answer some lingering questions, especially for people who are wondering why I keep talking about two separate weddings.

We are so proud and excited to announce that we are getting married! Hooray!!! We'd like to start out by saying a big "thank you!" to all of our friends and family who have loved us and supported us over the years. We're so excited to share our love with you! 

I know everyone probably has a lot of questions, so I'm going to try to answer some of the big ones for you right now. :-) 

OMG, when are you going to post pictures of your ring???

I generally don't wear jewelry, so we decided it would be best to save the ring until our wedding day. We have several ring options on the table right now, and we're still narrowing it down to the one we like the most. I can promise you that it will be unconventional--we will be buying our rings from a person we're familiar with who forges metal (mostly copper) into strong, modern-looking jewelry. So it will probably look like no wedding ring you've ever seen before!

Have you set a date?

Not yet, no. Our dream is to buy a house in the next couple years, just outside of town with a little bit of land attached to it, and have a simple wedding in our own backyard. However, we are still several years off from being in a place in our lives where that is possible, so we've divided the wedding into two parts. Part 1 will be a tiny civil ceremony at the courthouse, and it will occur this winter (as in, 3-4 months from now), probably December or January after I finish my student teaching. Part 2 will occur after we've bought a house, and will be a backyard wedding with extended family and friends. This will also be the wedding where we will have religious officiants present and will have a full ceremony and reception. 

But Florence, I am your uncle/aunt/cousin/very close friend. Can I come to your civil ceremony?

We are holding firm to our plan that the civil ceremony will be extremely small and will only include immediate family.  Our guest list for the civil ceremony includes 11 people including ourselves and the officiant, and everyone on that list is a parent, sibling, or grandparent. Remember that we are having a whole other wedding that we are excited to invite you to! You are not missing our wedding at all, and we love you very much and are excited to celebrate with you when we have our formal wedding. 

Tell us about your super-romantic proposal!

Everything about our relationship has evolved very organically, and our decision to get married was the same way. I usually don't tell people that one of us "proposed", because we just discussed it together and came to the decision that it was time to get married. We'd been bouncing around the idea for a while, and last weekend we kind of just woke up and wondered why we weren't married yet, and all of a sudden it was clear to us that it was time. Nobody got down on one knee, nobody produced a ring, and there was no romantic proposal, but it couldn't have felt more right to us.