Little Rock · Arkansas
Elope near Little Rock.
About ninety minutes northwest of the city, at the foot of Mt. Nebo. Far enough that it feels like you left, close enough that your people can drive home that night.
Why Little Rock couples end up out here
Almost every couple who calls me from Little Rock says a version of the same thing. They toured a downtown ballroom, or a converted warehouse in the SoMa district, and the room alone was $6,000 before a single flower went in it. Then catering. Then rentals. Then a coordinator on top of that.
What they actually wanted was somewhere quiet, with a lot of green, where the day did not feel like an event being staged in a rented box. That is what we built out here.
Our weekday minimony is $2,900 Monday through Thursday, and that is not a room rental. It includes your florals, which I design myself, your cake, your cake and punch reception, your planning, and me running your wedding day start to finish. For most Little Rock couples that number lands somewhere between a third and half of what they were quoted in town, and it already has the pieces they were about to go shopping for.
The drive is shorter than you think
Head west on I-40 and get off at Russellville, then drop south on Highway 7 across the Dardanelle bridge. Roughly an hour and a half, and the Arkansas River is beside you for most of it. Petit Jean sits off to your left on the way in and Mt. Nebo rises up right as you arrive.
I mention the drive on purpose. Several of my couples have told me the drive turned out to be part of it, the stretch where their families stopped checking work email and started acting like they were going somewhere. You do not get that going ten minutes across town.
Your guests can absolutely make it
Up to 30 guests are included, and we can go to 70 at $35 a head. Nearly every Little Rock family drives up the morning of and drives home that evening without any trouble. If some of your people would rather stay over, Russellville is fifteen minutes away with the usual hotels, and there are cabins and a lodge up on Mt. Nebo for anybody who wants to make a weekend of it.
About choosing a weekday
This is the part Little Rock couples hesitate on, and I understand it. Here is what I have watched happen over and over: people take one day off for the people they love. A Tuesday in October is genuinely easier on out-of-town family than a Saturday in June when everybody in the state is already at somebody else's wedding.
And the photographer you have been following on Instagram, the one who has been booked solid on Saturdays since last spring, is very likely wide open that Tuesday.
Come see ours
We are on 20 acres at the foot of Mt. Nebo in Dardanelle. My husband Josh built our chapel by hand and I planted the gardens. I design every bride's flowers myself and I am there on your wedding day running it, start to finish. Send me your date and I will tell you the same day whether it is open.
If a weekday works for you, $2,900 covers just about all of it.