Happy. Healthy. Heathen.

What a delicious, delightful, precious, charming, whimsical weekend.

We gathered in the woods near Veneta, Oregon in July 2026, and proceeded to have a magical, beautiful, fantasy weekend.

I guess the real beginning happened when Glenda and Nick first met, but this blog is about the wedding planning process, Camp Lane, and how we made it all happen.

As you’ll read later, we reserved Camp Lane exactly 2 years prior to the date, as is their process. So on July 1, 2024, we paid our reservation fee, and got to work. Not everyone would want to plan this far out, but we enjoyed every minute and it gave us a long, forgiving runway to get our plan together.

We did the usual research for our major vendors: photographer, caterer, dance floor rental, and in this case, our yurt supplier. Everything else we took on ourselves. We have a big family, and large friend circles, so part of our spreadsheet planning was building teams for all the tasks: Decorations, Food, Activities, etc.

The summer of the wedding finally got here. We began staging all the items to take with us, and building our grocery and supplies list.

On Wednesday, after months of gathering supplies, planning schedules, and arranging flights, we loaded up the cars and headed toward Camp Lane.

Camp Lane is a county park, located along the Siuslaw River about 25 minutes from the Oregon coast. It’s not specifically billed as a wedding venue, but it sure does work as one.

Our event was my daughter’s wedding. Most of the family live in the PNW, and we had guests from Nevada, California, Tennessee, and several other states.

Some of the photos I’ll be sharing are from our photographer, who was incredible. Summer and Latife were everywhere and not once did it feel intrusive or awkward. They captured so many of our moments, and we could not be more pleased, nor more enthusiastic to recommend and endorse them.

We used a few vendors, who I’ll tag here as I go. A lot of the work we did ourselves, with our friends and family. It was one of the features of the event, that we would all work together. We had the camp from a Wednesday through the following Monday, which made it a full-on throwdown.

When we sent out the save-the-dates and the invitations, we included a link to Glenda and Nick’s wedding website. That will give a fuller picture of who they are and what the vibe for the weekend was going to be. We also had created a Discord for the entire thing, so we could manage questions, travel, dietary issues, etc. I can’t recommend this enough – the Discord was fun and lively, and so SO helpful.

This also helped us prepare everyone for what kind of event it was going to be: casual, warm, informal, with tons of food and activities, but also a big group effort.

Because of the nature of the venue, one of our vendors was a Yurt provider. Richard was delightful to work with, and we encouraged our guests who wanted a little upgraded experience to reach out to him and arrange to have a beautiful furnished yurt for the duration of the event. He asked for a commitment of 5 yurts, and ultimately I believe we had about 8.

Our family is a camping family, and all of the children have campers. There is an area of Camp Lane specifically for this, and we had 6-8 campers parked here.

There is also camping space for tents, and some of our guests brought gear and set up in that area.

Camp Lane lists that they have bed space (think bunks from scout or church camp) for 100, and we probably used about half of those. There are 2 bath houses with multiple showers, and some of the bunk rooms had bathrooms/showers as well.

There is a commercial kitchen, and a huge gorgeous dining room. They have those old-school cafeteria-style fold-up tables with little round seats, but they can be decorated beyond recognition. The dining room (which I think they call the Lodge) has a massive fireplace and open rafters, but the lighting is a little cool, so you’d want to come with mood lighting if that’s a concern. We had our reception out under the covered pavilion, but we had breakfasts and the other meals in this room.

Our caterer was fantastic – not one note. They provided our requested vegetarian meal, and the display table was beautiful. I wish I could be more specific about each dish, but those of us who were hosting were grabbing bites as we could, so I have to rely on our guests for detail about each dish. (In the following photos: we provided the cheesecakes – in lieu of a wedding cake – that we got from Costco, and added the fresh berries)

The grounds of the camp lie along the Siuslaw River, in kind of a long park arrangement. This meant we had access to the river, although the banks are steep except for the beach area. The children of our guests enjoyed this, as well as a lot of our grownup guests, since it was a delightfully warm July weekend when we were there. It’s not deep – you can walk across to the other bank (waist-to-chest high water with a gentle current).

One word about the pups in these photos. Nick is a combat veteran, and we put in a special request to be able to have his 2 service dogs attend. There is a general no dogs policy at Camp Lane, but the caretaker was very understanding about our situation.

There were breathtaking enormous trees on the property, as well as a sweet bridge over a small creek, making photo ops available everywhere. We chose to have what we called an outdoor lounge, which we enjoyed preparing and thrift shopping for before the event. There was a large fire ring, use of which is 100% dependent on the wildfire risk at the time of the event. We were lucky in that it rained the weekend prior to ours, so we kept a bonfire going for most of the days of the event (BYO firewood).

We did the flowers ourselves as well, with flowers we purchased from Charles Little Flower Farm. Arranging to pick them up ourselves saved us money on delivery, and the kitchen had plenty of cooler space for us to store them a day or two before the ceremony.

Lane County has a reservation system for Camp Lane that makes reserving your weekend a bit of a challenge. They accept requests for reservations (with complete payment) exactly 2 years prior to your event. You can call them to see if they have any cancellations, and maybe once in a blue moon someone might get lucky that way; otherwise, you need to have your plan in place 2 years prior, AND be the first caller at the 2-years-prior day. While they require 100% payment, it’s refundable with the exception of $100 up to 90 days prior (CONFIRM THIS WITH CAMP LANE!). One cheat code for this is to pay to add a couple of extra days prior to your weekend (about $500 per day), so that you can call a day or two earlier. IOW, if you’re trying to reserve for an event on a Friday-Sunday, consider adding the Wednesday or Thursday prior to allow you to call one or two days earlier than others who want the same weekend. This also gives you an extra day to get there and get started on your decorating/layout, and was well worth the extra cost in our case.

In the following pictures, you’ll see some extraordinary work by Glenda and Nick’s family, created in those days before the big day. The display behind the couple’s table, and the altar for the ceremony were constructed with materials brought from home and found items on the grounds.

The caretaker of the camp at the time of this writing was a delightful person who went over and above any request we made of her. Her name is Teale, and she was as kind and helpful and welcoming and accommodating as we could possible ask for.

Because you rent the entire space, there are no quiet hours – party as long as you’d like, and with the exception of the folks in hotels or airbnbs, everyone’s sleeping space was stumbling distance from the reception.

The commercial kitchen had basically what we needed, and we loved the eclectic nature of the mix of old china plates. We had thrifted our own wine glasses and coffee mugs, as there weren’t enough of those for our 100 guests. There were plenty of plates and flatware. 2 things we rented were the dance floor (the pavilion was concrete, and we upgraded that to a wooden dance floor), and 100 water goblets.

We were delighted with our experience at Camp Lane. I don’t know what we would change even if we could. We brought some lawn games for the kids, but there’s horseshoes, volleyball, and basketball already there. We zhuzhed up the bathrooms with some mood lighting, nice hand soap, and health/beauty supplies. We also placed Welcome To Oregon baskets in each cabin with earplugs, first aid, hygiene items, and snacks, because we’re extra.

When we researched wedding venues, the costs were astronomical. Camp Lane provided an economical but no less fabulous environment for this most special of days. If you can manage the effort required to schedule (and the 2-years-prior lead time), and the rustic nature of the cabins, you have found a fantastic secret to a one-of-a-kind PNW experience.