Wedded bliss, country style

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2015 (3942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEAR STEINBACH — Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?

Mooo.

Some young groom standing at the altar at the “wedding barn” is free to borrow that snappy comeback, courtesy of the Free Press.

Others can just give their “I do’s” in their native tongue at the Rustic Wedding Barn, where Mendelssohn’s Wedding March has replaced the sound of cattle lowing. The wedding barn has already been the site of more than 100 nuptials, with 35 more lined up for this year.

“I think destination weddings are just becoming more popular,” said Edna Wiebe, who manages the barn with her three sisters.

“I tell people you cannot not have fun here,” said her dad, Peter Wiebe, who built the business after refurbishing the dairy barn and grounds as a retirement hobby.

Some people almost have too much fun. One wedding party set up skeet shooting in back for early arriving guests. Another couple, during the Winnipeg Jets’ short playoff run, tried hooking up the hockey game for the reception, rather than postpone nuptials.

There was a wedding party that imported enough hay bales to seat more than 100 guests for an outdoor wedding ceremony. Another couple had fresh alfalfa bales placed throughout the barn for added aroma. Others have brought horses for wedding photos, and antique tractors or cars.

The farmyard includes a dairy barn, with the stanchions for the cow stalls still in place. The stanchions are stylishly angled, like a back slash on a computer keyboard, and almost look like jousting lances making a path for the bride and groom.

There’s a hayloft — of course, there’s a hayloft — for the reception and dancing, with white lights lining its aged wooden rafters. It has air conditioning, a bar, a music system and large screen for slides or videos.

The hay shack is a separate building, decked out entirely in white — including floor-length sheer curtains — except for the weathered wood beams and frame. There’s also an air-conditioned parlour in back of the tractor shed where the bride can get ready.

It rents for $2,800, and everything is on location. The bride and groom can get ready here, shoot their photos and have the wedding ceremony and reception. If an outdoor wedding is planned and it rains, everything can be moved inside. There’s also a kitchen (the former milk parlour), and people can choose their own caterer, bartender and music man, or take ones recommended.

One of the venues, the dairy barn, even has a faint whiff of old barn smell — even though the building hasn’t housed livestock in 35 years. It keeps it real. The scent is actually so faint, and so easily overpowered by other smells, that it isn’t a concern. It’s more like a perfumy nostalgia du jour, a transporting scent to distant memories. (True story. One of this writer’s earliest childhood memories is of clambering over hay bales at a wedding reception in a barn near Steinbach.)

“People walk in and say, ‘Oh! I love the smell!’ ” said Edna. “It still smells like a barn but it smells clean.”

All the facilities are beyond spotless.

“We’re pretty fastidious about cleaning,” said Edna.

“My husband (Matthew) and I really liked the country feel,” said Sharnelle Wiens, explaining why she chose to be married at the wedding barn last year. “We’re not much into super-big, elephant weddings. We wanted something that was more us.” (The couple run Viking Lodge, a hunting and fishing resort in Cranberry Portage.)

There’s also 6.5 acres in which to roam. People coming out from Winnipeg seem to unwind once they are on a farm with its big, open spaces, the Wiebes said. “I think there’s definitely a feel to have a wedding here, an ambiance. It makes it more of an occasion,” said Edna.

It didn’t start out that way. Peter, now 79, purchased the old farm buildings, built in 1961, and yard site in 2007 as a place for he and his brother, Jake, to restore tractors as a hobby. They cleaned it, restored it, and then a brother asked if he could hold his 50th wedding anniversary there. Then a grandson asked if he and his fiancé could be married there. Peter was soon besieged with requests.

The wedding barn can hold up to 200 people. It’s available from April until mid-November, and located just east of Steinbach on Highway 52. More information is available at therusticweddingbarn.com, or on Facebook.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca