Lauren and I were about to settle on the Olympic Hills Country Club in Eden Prairie as the site of our wedding reception next fall, but we had one last place to check out Monday after work, the Profile Event Center.  Located very close to the U of M campus in Minneapolis, it’s just two blocks away from the brand new Gophers football stadium.  And the price was so much better than anywhere else we’d looked.  We kept waiting for the guy to drop some sort of bombshell, some huge tax or hidden fee, but it never came.  And regardless of cost, it was still the coolest place we saw, so we wasted very little time in booking.

There were two different rooms we could pick from.  One was more of a traditional reception room, while the other was this crazy state-of-the-art theater/night club room.  Of course that’s the one I really wanted, while Lauren wanted the more traditional one.  But both rooms have hi-tech built-in lighting, sound, and video systems.  With the cameras and projection screens provided, we considered doing something like Kiss Cam at Twins’ games with the people in attendance.  And there will be no need for a DJ since we can just plug my laptop into their house system.

There is still the concern of having 65,000 people crammed into TCF Field next door the same time as the reception.  We checked the schedule and the day we wanted most, September 26, was taken, so we decided on October 3.  But that’s the day Wisconsin plays Minnesota, so it could be a little crazy.  The only fall Saturdays available with no football are September 5 and October 17, and we’re not sure if people would rather come over Labor Day weekend or if that would be a bad time.  So don’t go marking October 3 on the calendars just yet.  If you have an opinion one way or another on going to a wedding over Labor Day weekend, we’d like to hear from you!

In some other news, you may have heard I’m going to San Francisco the first week of January for the Macworld trade show.  Since my plane ticket is already paid for by the company, I thought it would be a nice chance for Lauren and I to take a little trip together.  We tried getting Lauren the same ticket as me going out to SFO, but the ticket price skyrocketed to over $700.  In fact, every plane ticket to SFO was ridiculous.  As it turned out, it was far cheaper to fly into Las Vegas.  It was even cheaper for me to fly into Vegas, then from there go to SFO.  So that’s the plan: we’ll fly to Vegas Friday morning, spend two whole days there, and on Sunday, Lauren will fly back to MSP and I’ll go on to my trade show.  I talked to Dusty Hovde and we plan on meeting up while down there.