For the last stop on our Sunday venue tour, Katelyn and I drove an extra hour beyond Cliffside Lodge to go visit Point Sebago Resort in Casco, Maine. Katelyn had called and left a message a few days before we planned to go out on our visits, and we hadn't heard back from them. We assumed, much with other locations, that we would be able to see the venue anyway, regardless of whether or not we had a planned visit set up.
We stopped on the side of the road because of this particularly beautiful sight between Cliffside Lodge and Point Sebago Resort. It's a good thing we did, because it's the only good that came out of our drive.
Upon arriving at Point Sebago Resort, we stopped at the welcome center and I went to the bathroom (it had been a long day of driving) while Katelyn spoke to the people behind the desk. When I returned, Katelyn was a little less than pleased, and the story was relayed to me as we drove back home.
Apparently the first person Katelyn talked to was willing to let us go through the gated entrance to Point Sebago Resort to drive through the property and see if we liked it, but a manager came out and said that if we did not have explicit plans to meet with their wedding person, we could not even drive past the gate.
While this is just as much our own faults for deciding to drive out of our way to see a venue that we didn't have an appointment with, no other venue that we'd visited had flat-out denied us entry to at least give their venue a look-over. Katelyn doesn't get riled by people too easily, but she was pretty angry on our drive from the venue and vowed that we would not be giving the venue any further consideration because of how they had treated her.
This all goes back to my opinion on visiting venues; if you stop by and they are able to accomodate you even though they weren't necessarily expecting you, that builds a lot of goodwill towards the wedding possibly being held there. If you stop by and they are unable to be flexible about letting you drive through the venue quickly after being on the road for over three hours that day, then what are the people at that venue going to do if something goes wrong and you need their help on your wedding day?
For their part, the wedding planner at Point Sebago Resort did contact Katelyn a few days after our failed visit. We have no interest in driving back there from Blue Hill, however, especially at the end of a grueling venue search. I'm sure that the venue is quite pretty (we wouldn't have decided to go out of our way to visit if it hadn't intrigued us at least a little bit), but I can't report on anything beyond what is presented online.
More information and photographs of Point Sebago Resort can be found at the venue's website, http://www.pointsebago.com/. Point Sebago Resort is located about forty minutes from Portland, fifty minutes from Lewiston, and two hours and thirty minutes from Bangor.
We set up an appointment to view that place for my wedding.... and the woman had double booked herself and had to cancel on us at the last minute, after both of our mothers had gotten time off and made plans to go up on a week day. We were not impressed either!!
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