In March 2001, my friends and I (this is Mike) had gone mountain biking in Santiago Oaks Regional Park. As we rode by the park entrance, I noticed that a wedding was going on in a garden area there. Seemed pretty nice, I thought, but it didn't even occur to me that maybe this place was worth checking out for my own wedding. After all, that was still over 14 months away - plenty of time!

Around June or so, Bev and I started looking for wedding sites. We knew some of the good ones would begin filling up soon, so we had to act fairly quickly. We thought about having our wedding at Lake Tahoe and did quite a bit of research over the internet. It seemed pretty nice, but we would want to take a trip up there to see things in person before committing to anything.

As we realized it could be difficult to plan a wedding that wasn't local, we began focusing our attention on the southern California area. In the course of our research, I happened upon the Orange County parks web site and remembered that wedding I had seen at Santiago Oaks. The location was nearly perfect, so Bev and I went down there one Saturday afternoon to check it out. Another wedding was already setting up, so we discretely checked it out from afar and decided to come back the next day for an appointment with the park ranger.

That Sunday the ranger showed us around the area, explained the terms and the facilities that would be available to us. It was perfect for both the ceremony and the reception. We liked what we saw and immediately booked it. We're very excited about our choice for our wedding site!

Here are a few pictures we took in January 2002 on one of the few cloudy days this year.