A weekend getaway in Nashville, TN Part 1

Nashville was a pleasant surprise! 

At first glance, there isn’t really too much to do around town unless you’re a die hard country music fan. But we quickly found this to be untrue. 

We arrived around lunch hour, just in time to join a line of eager foodies waiting to partake in Nashville’s famous hot chicken at Hattie B. This is crispy yet moist fried chicken at various spice levels. Medium heat was good enough for us to taste the kick but still be able to enjoy the chicken without burning our taste buds. 

After lunch, we headed towards downtown Nashville where we quickly discovered throngs of other tourists. Being that this was a random weekend in February we were a bit surprised but the crowd just added to the lively atmosphere. 

Even though it was early in the afternoon we could already hear the sounds of live music escaping through the windows of every establishment as we wandered down Broadway Ave. 

We stopped at Mike’s Ice Cream for some amazing ice cream and hot chocolate. Sounds strange, I know, but there were plenty of others who also thought it was a good idea. 

After checking into our hotel and taking a brief nap, it was time to hit the town and see what the nightlife is all about! 

Public transportation isn’t stellar but Lyft was doing a big promotion and our hotel had coupon codes  so we were able to get to and from Broadway (the main stretch of live music) quite easily. 

Our first stop was Honky Tony Central, a rocking party house with three floors of three different bands. The drinks here were The most expensive of all our drinks that night. Not so much country music, all the bands played cover songs which people crowded together to dance to. Even when we switched floors we found the same song being played, so not sure if they had the same set list or not. Interestingly there was a crackdown near us where someone underage must have snuck in and was now asked to leave. 

10pm seemed to be a universal band changeover time so we quickly took it as our cue to change venues. 

Layla s Bluegrass Inn was our second stop for the night and we were super lucky to snag a tiny table. The crowd was significantly different – a bit older, less drunk people – and the music was classic country hillbilly music. 

Our last stop for the night was Benchmark. This was away from the crowd of bars on Broadway but the music didn’t suffer at all. We enjoyed a local singer songwriter with an intimate crowd before heading back. 

Well actually we stopped for a quick midnight snack at Sbarro before catching our Lyft ride to the hotel. 

Nashville was definitely more exciting than we had hoped for. No wonder it’s such an up and coming place for bachelorettes! (We had passed by multiple women wearing the veil and tons of party bikes) 

Wedding planning : Creating invitations with Vistaprint

At the end of the day, it depends on how much you (or your guests) care about formality.

We quickly determined that although our parents guests would appreciate formal printed invitations that came in the mail, our friends wouldn’t care one way or another. So we had a two prong approach with invitations : printed and emailed.

Since invitations weren’t a priority item in our wedding budget, we had no problem with taking our invitation problem to Vistaprint. I had considered buying wedding invitation packages from Michaels or Staples that you print and customize by yourself on your home printer, but the idea of having to wrestle with my printer and the hidden cost of ink and time in front of the printer made me look elsewhere. Especially since online wedding invitation sites offer frequent promotions. There were other wedding invitation sites such as wedding paper divas with beautiful designs but we wanted something at a lower cost.

Choosing a design

We browsed through design after design, but neither of us could agree on one. And so, I tossed out the idea of creating a custom one, blending elements we liked from the different designs we saw. A few days later, we had our invitation designed on Photoshop as one image. Uploading a custom design to Vistaprint was incredibly easy, and the Vistaprint program confirmed if the image resolution is good enough for printing.

You have the option of printing a colour design, black and white design, or leaving the back blank. Since a colour back is included in the standard price, we just uploaded an image of the background colour of the invitation with its border as the design for the back of the invitation.

Picking a size

There are several card size options available but for the invitation, we picked the vertical flat invitation 5 x 7 because to mail any larger would incur more postage fees. (Be careful of card sizing and shapes! You might have to pay more to mail irregular shapes and sizes.) For the RSVP cards, we found that the postcards worked really well and cost less than a horizontal flat invitation at a 5.5 x 4 size for our particular promotion. The postcard is the same as the horizontal flat invitation except that it doesn’t come with an envelope.

Estimating numbers

You want to avoid having to order more than once because you estimated the wrong number of invitations because the price per invitation goes down as you order more, and you don’t want to have to pay that flat shipping fee again. When we estimated the number of invitations we would need, we purposely ordered slightly more than we counted just in case we would lose or mess some up when assembling.This turned out to be our estimated number +10

Choosing paper

Paper weight matters. More than any other aspect of the wedding invitation, the weight of the paper the invitation is printed on is a clear signal to your guests if you cheaped out or not. Since it’s the first impression of the wedding to your guests, you may not want to choose the cheapest paper option there is.

Vistaprint offers a number of options for paper. In my opinion, it is well worth the extra few dollars to select a paper with a heavier weight. We ended up using the premium white matte stock which felt appropriately heavy.

Envelopes

The invitations come with standard white envelopes while the postcards did not. This worked out fine since they were all going into one envelope anyways.We opted out of the personalized envelope – and the system generated one was just awful. (A smaller version of my custom invitation design graced the front of the envelope)

Promotional code

We signed up for the email mailing list to get a promotion (20% off plus free shipping), and even earned some Vistaprint Cash we were able to use for printing our thank you cards later on. Be aware that the Vistaprint site has frequent promotions that it runs. If you’re not happy with a particular deal, just wait a week. Another one will pop up.

Shipping

Shipping was quick and easy and the invitations and RSVP cards arrived in a box, every 50 pieces plastic wrapped together. I didn’t see any defects or folded edges and so was really happy with the final product.

Emailed Invitations

As for our emailed invitations, we wrote emails that had a sentence or two addressing our friends, then uploaded the wedding invitation and RSVP images to the body of the email (and attached as well, just in case), then sent them off to our friends. Easy peasy!

And there you have it! A quick summary of how to handle wedding invitations!