Revive Coffee and Wine Backyard Wedding | Matt + Elizabeth

~~September 29, 2020~~

~~August 28, 2021~~

October 8, 2021

Elizabeth and Matt originally planned their wedding pre-covid but the pandemic had other plans for them. Flashforward one year and the Caldor Fire is moving closer and closer to the Tahoe basin, and yet, Elizabeth and Matt stayed incredibly calm and collected. We had a brief phone call about two weeks before their rescheduled date for their Revive backyard wedding, where they chatted with me about whether or not to postpone due to the likelihood of eventual and possible evacuations. At that point, none of us in Lake Tahoe thought an evacuation would ever happen, but Elizabeth and Matt showed such grace and compassion when they told me that the last thing they wanted was to hold a celebration in a time of stress for locals that would bring additional people into an area that was already going to be difficult to evacuate, should the need arise.

In the end, after consulting all their vendors, they decided to postpone out of an abundance of caution and in the end, that caution was overwhelmingly necessary. The day after their scheduled second date, Sunday, August 29th 2021, South Lake Tahoe started to prepare for imminent mandatory evacuation orders. On Monday, August 30th, the entire southern population of the basin was evacuated. By Tuesday, August 31st it looked like our town had been raised by the fire that eventually consumed 221,775 acres across the Sierra Nevada mountain range of Northern CA.

By some sort of miracle, the wildland firefighters and teams dedicated to the Caldor Fire were able to save every single structure in the Lake Tahoe basin and thus, with great excitement and relief, Elizabeth and Matt were able to get married at Revive Coffee and Wine in South Lake Tahoe, in an intimate backyard garden wedding on their third date… October 8, 2021. They were surrounded by a handful of friends and family members, who were full of laughter, charm and grateful spirits.

It was a beautiful crisp clear day with the blue skies that those of us who live in Tahoe missed SO incredibly much for the majority of our summer. It was, in short, an absolutely perfect day for Matt and Elizabeth’s Revive Coffee and Wine wedding. They say the third time’s a charm, and I do have to agree that it was.