Quite a lot of wedding related news today.

Jonathan and I went to visit two more places for wedding venues. One was a hotel on a large village highstreet, and it was... OK. When we were sitting in the car park, just before going in, I got a call on my mobile from Stephen, (an unusual event) and it turns out, he and his girlfriend Nicky have got engaged! It's hard to describe how happy I feel for them both. Even though since I live in Aylesbury and they live in Birkenhead, and we haven't seen each other all that often recently, the times I've seen them both together, they seem so happy and right for each other, I'm just so thrilled for them both! Especially since I like Nicky enough to have asked her to be one of my bridesmaids. :-)

I've told them though because Jonathan and I got engaged first, it's only fair that we get married first. ;-)

Anyway, onto venues. We've now seen three places, the first a fortnight ago. That place was OK. Probably slightly better than the place we saw first today. The place we saw today was quite small, only had a few nice backdrops, whereas I see myself getting married somewhere with miles of beautiful scenery. The actual place had rather dark rooms, quite old fashioned decor inside, but the function room was very large, compared to the first place we saw.

The place we saw this afternoon was GORGEOUS. Of course, we have yet to see more places, but this had a really nice large function room, beautifully decorated, a lovely patio outside, with gorgeous views from the room, as well as there being over 100 rooms the guests could stay in overnight. The pricing was rather expensive, especially for the meal, but we'll see if we can bring the cost down... And of course, there are plenty more places to visit, there might be one more gorgeous...

Next weekend, we're going to book to see one venue on Saturday afternoon, and then in the morning, we're going to go to the bank to see if we can pay a chunk off the mortgage. We've worked out that by paying off 6 month's mortgage now with the money Jonathan got from his gran, we can reduce the amount of time paying off the mortgage by 17 months.

We got thinking about how we could reduce it more, by paying some of the money I earn off into the mortgage. If I did that, then we worked out we could pay the mortgage off in 12 years time, as opposed to 23... Saving a huge amount of money with it. But we need to save as much money as we can for our wedding first of all, and we need new double glazing (not that we let the salesmen know that though), so there's a lot to be done... and a lot that needs to be paid for in the next few years. But still, we're doing quite comfortably.

And I'm feeling a lot better about all the wedding plans after seeing these places.