For a long time, one of the decisions I struggled with the most whenever I thought about having our wedding was deciding the location…and I’m not even talking about picking a venue, I’m merely referring to the geographic location!! I went back and forth for literally years about whether to have our wedding in my beloved home country, Mexico, or in my current home, USA.

Then all of the sudden, we decided it was time to stop fretting and just do it, and all the decisions became so easy. It’s amazing the clarity we can achieve when we really eliminate all the “if” and focus on what really matters…and to us that was having the least amount of stress so we could focus on enjoying the moment and the true meaning of this wedding ritual.

So having our wedding here in Arizona was the most practical choice because it made the wedding planning that much easier for me. I couldn’t even have imagined how easy! It turned out finding the perfect venue for us truly was a piece of cake. For years I had looked at hundreds of venues online and in magazines, and I don’t even remember now how I came up with the idea of Arcadia Farms, but after deciding we would have an itty bitty wedding, I somehow knew that was the first place I had to check out personally. And that was it! First place I visited, and it was perfection.

Growing up, whenever I would picture my wedding, I always had a vision of standing in a luscious green garden, which it’s funny because 99% of weddings in Mexico happen inside a church so I don’t even know where I first got the idea of a garden wedding. Even funnier is that I didn’t know Arcadia Farms could offer the choice of a garden. I knew it was a charming little restaurant, with a cute patio, but it was until I was there talking to the the event coordinator that she mentioned that across the street from the restaurant lived the owner and that she had a lovely courtyard/garden she would occasionally rent out for events. I immediately asked to check it out and as soon as she opened the gate and I walked in, I felt my vision of a garden wedding come to life.

It was so lusciously green and full of flowers, with big trees towering over the whole space and a fountain to add to the ambiance. It also had touches of Spanish style tile all around, which it’s a kind of tile very common in Mexico, so I felt it had a bit of a Mexican touch which made me even happier. It felt like a little oasis in the middle of the desert, like an almost secret garden I never would’ve guessed was there. The whole thing was just a dream come true. But why don’t I let these gorgeous pictures do the talking instead?

  Photos by Steven Toupin