October 2010

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Hike to Eagle Rock, Topanga State Park

October 24, 2010 in Hiking, Local Trails | No comments

By Katharine

This weekend Nathan and I decided we needed to get back outside and go for a hike. We have been spending weekends visiting possible wedding venues and studying for midterms, but now that we have our venue set, we were ready to get back on the hiking trails.  We decided to do a short hike in the Santa Monica Mountains to Eagle Rock. Modern Hiker, my favorite site for hiking inspiration in LA, has a detailed trip report so I won’t cover the details here.

It was a gray day in LA, and we actually got sprinkled on at the end of the hike. But it was a perfect day for this hike, which has almost no shade and mostly just follows a fire road. Eagle Rock itself is a pretty cool sandstone rock formation that juts out of the side of the hill. The tiny people on top give you a sense of how big it is.

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It was a pretty uneventful hike, but it felt good to be back on the trail. And the beginning of the trail had some beautiful live oaks 🙂

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See more pictures from our hike.

We have a venue and a date!

October 23, 2010 in Wedding | 2 comments

By Katharine

Last weekend Nathan and I made great progress in planning our wedding- We selected a venue and a date and signed the contract! We will be getting married on August 6, 2011 at Middle Ranch in Lake View Terrace, CA.

I feel like a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders now… and now I feel like we can start thinking about the smaller details like invitations, colors, decorations, etc.

The venue search was pretty involved for us, we started with a ridiculous list I made of places in SoCal that had pretty trees (my one requirement) without any idea of pricing. Then I started adding expected pricing as best as I could from various websites and I realized that most of these places were way out of our league. So then I made a second ridiculous list of more budget-friendly venues.  Together we combined the reasonable ones from each list to get a list of 50 possible places. I don’t know how it came out to be a perfect 50, that was not intentional! We narrowed those down to 11 that we wanted to pursue and started making phone calls. Our first call was already completely booked for summer 2011… and we started to freak out a bit, but luckily most other places had some open weekends. We ended up visiting 5 places and liking 3. And we are very happy with our final decision. Plus, catering is included as apart of the package, so we now have our caterer selected as well!

How can you go wrong with a place that has trees like this:

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We really liked Middle Ranch because it has a very laid back atmosphere, but is still elegant with an open/airy feel. We will have access to a nice lawn area for the ceremony and a lodge and outdoor patio area for the reception. And there are beautiful large trees speckled throughout… so I love it!

Well, we can officially begin the countdown to our wedding!

You can see more pictures of the venue here.

Victor’s Birthday Visit Sporting Clays

October 11, 2010 in Los Angeles, Sporting Clays | No comments

By Nathan

My parents came up for the weekend for my Dad’s birthday and to check out two possible wedding venues.  After visiting Middle Ranch  we also headed up the street to Moore ‘n Moore Sporting Clays.  It’s been several months since I was at the range and close to a year since my brother and dad went with me.  It was a perfect outing to empty my prepaid membership card (~100 clays) and shoot the couple of left over boxes of shells from dove season.

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After a few warm up stations we decided to add a little pressure.  The game was best out of 5 doubles alternating between shooters.  Even though we were a little rusty we still hit that majority of the targets.

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I also took the opportunity to take some photos of my brother and created some sample advertisements.

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In a little over an hour we had emptied my card of clays and headed to the next wedding venue.  This weekend we have chosen Middle Ranch for our wedding so there is a good possibility of a morning shooting event before the wedding!

See More Photos Here