| Date: | Saturday October 6, 2018, 4:00PM |
| Ceremony Location: | Edgebrook Woods Forest Preserve 6129 N Central Ave. Chicago, IL 60646 |
| Reception Location: | Mathew Bieszczat Volunteer Resource Center 6100 N Central Ave. Chicago, IL 60646 |
Transportation
The ceremony and reception sites are at separate Cook County Forest Preserve locations 1/2 mile away from each other, on opposite sides of Central Avenue. It is possible to park at the reception site and walk the half-mile each way to and from the ceremony, but the road is not especially pleasant, so driving between the locations is recommended. There is ample free parking at both locations. The parking lot at the ceremony site closes at dusk, so it is not possible to leave a car there during the reception.
The sites are a half-mile walk from the Metra MD-N Edgebrook commuter train station, and the CTA Blue Line subway to Jefferson Park with a transfer to the 85A Central bus will drop you right between the two locations.
It can sometimes be difficult making a left turn out of the ceremony site onto Central Ave., so if you get tired of waiting, you can make a right onto Central, then an immediate left onto Louise (there’s the beginning of a left-turn lane there) and make two more lefts through the residential neighborhood, where you can then turn right onto Central and right to the reception site.
Ceremony Details
The ceremony will be outdoors, in a grass-covered clearing in a grove of oak trees. The ceremony will be standing-only, though there will be picnic tables available nearby to sit at as people gather. If there is rain, or if the ground is too soft and muddy, it will be at the same outdoor location, but under the open-sided picnic shelter.
The normal high temperature for October 6th is 66 degrees, and in recent years it has ranged between 50 and 80 degrees.
Reception Details
The reception follows directly after the ceremony, with dinner served at 5:00PM.
The Forest Preserve requires a hard stop at 10:00PM, but we would love for people to come continue the party at our house just a few miles away.
Gifts
Your presence and support are the main gift we hope to receive from our guests! Also, we’re old we’ve been living together so long we have everything we’ll ever need in our home and so we are not registered for traditional gifts. But if you want to contribute to our celebration of our life together, we would get the highest value out of a contribution to our honeymoon fund.
Our dream honeymoon is to ride our bicycles around New Zealand. And while riding is a relatively inexpensive way to travel, flying to the other side of the globe is not. So any contribution would help to get us (and our bikes!) on an airplane to an exotic land that we otherwise would be unlikely to make the leap to. However, to get even more value out of your gift, such a trip would likely be delayed until we’re in the long-term bike-touring phase of our lives, because once that transport investment has been made, it would be wasteful to spend only a couple weeks there before returning.
For the electronically-minded, you can contribute directly to Neil & Rett’s Honeymoon Fund