Getting married on this coast.

Getting your people here

There is no big airport on this coast, and pretending otherwise is how guest lists fall apart. Four realistic options, and the drive is part of the decision:

• Medford (MFR) — the one most guests use. The widest flight schedule in southern Oregon, and roughly three hours over the mountains to Brookings or Gold Beach. It's also our home base, so the same team handling your coastal day already knows that drive cold.
• Crescent City (CEC) — the closest airport to Brookings, about half an hour south across the California line, with limited scheduled service. Excellent when the schedule happens to work.
• North Bend / Coos Bay (OTH) — about two hours north of Gold Beach, on the coast the whole way. Small, and a pretty drive.
• Eugene (EUG) or the Bay Area — bigger airports, four-plus hours of driving. Sometimes the cheapest flights by a wide margin, which matters when you're asking forty people to travel.

Tell guests the drive on the invitation. Not the website, not a group text the week before — on the paper, in the first sentence. Half the friction in a destination wedding is people discovering the last three hours at baggage claim.

Everyone will need a car, or you'll need to arrange transport. Rentals at the smaller airports run out; say so early. If you're bringing a group, a shuttle for the ceremony hour is money well spent, because parking at the prettiest spots on this coast is usually a gravel pullout.

Book lodging before you book anything else. Brookings-Harbor, Gold Beach, and Bandon have hotels and a deep supply of vacation rentals, but summer weekends go early, and a wedding block is a different conversation than one room. Some properties solve this entirely — Crook Point has eight oceanfront homes on the ranch itself, so your family sleeps five minutes from the ceremony.

Give yourselves a buffer day. Fog, a late flight, a slow drive down 101 — the couples who arrive two days early are the ones who are relaxed on the morning of.

The paperwork, in both states

The paperwork here is light. Pick up your license from the state you'll say your vows in — Oregon for Brookings and the beaches, California for Crescent City and the redwoods — and have someone you love sign it as your officiant. Neither state requires a professionally licensed officiant; a friend with a free online ordination is exactly as official as anyone else, and that's how most of our couples do it.

Oregon

Both of you apply together at any county clerk's office with photo ID — Curry County covers Brookings and Gold Beach. There are no blood tests and no residency requirement, so out-of-state couples are welcome. Then two numbers matter: a three-day waiting period before the license can be used, and sixty days of validity after that. The license works anywhere in Oregon, not just the county that issued it.

Flying in close to the date? The clerk can waive the three-day wait for a small fee, so it's an errand, not a crisis.

California

For a ceremony in Crescent City or the redwoods, the closest issuing office is the Del Norte County Clerk-Recorder in Crescent City. No waiting period, and the license is good for ninety days. It's a small office, so check their hours and whether they want an appointment — we'll make the call with you if you'd rather.

Permits

Oregon beaches. The ocean shore is public, and a small ceremony or a picnic setup — a table, chairs around it, a handful of guests — is treated like anyone else bringing gear to the beach. We've never needed a permit for one. Oregon Parks and Recreation asks for a special use permit at fifty or more people, or for a seated ceremony with rows of chairs, event tents, a stage, or anything that restricts public access. If that's your wedding, start the application early — they want lead time measured in months.

California redwoods. Ceremonies in Jedediah Smith, Del Norte Coast, or Prairie Creek Redwoods require a special use permit through California State Parks — for every wedding, including a two-person elopement. There's an application window (roughly six months out to about a month before), a non-refundable application fee, and a list of pre-approved ceremony sites, with room to request one that isn't on it.

City and county property. Rented facilities like Capella by the Sea come with their own rules on insurance, music, decorations, and hours. Get them in writing before anyone designs anything.

We handle these applications for our couples, which mostly means starting them early enough that "handled" is even possible.

What a coastal wedding here actually costs you

We're not going to put numbers on this page — our current pricing lives on the weddings and elopements pages, and every venue and vendor sets their own. What's worth understanding is the shape of the budget, because it's different from a city wedding in three ways.

The ceremony site can be nearly free, or it can be the whole thing. A public beach costs nothing for a small ceremony. A city chapel costs an hourly rental. A private coastal ranch is a real venue fee that also solves your lodging, your rain plan, and your parking. All three produce beautiful weddings — they just move the money to different places.

Travel is a line item, for you and for us. Your guests are flying and driving; you may be renting houses. Vendors coming from the Rogue Valley carry a travel fee that covers fuel and lodging — ours is modest and listed with our coastal pricing. A local-only vendor team is sometimes cheaper and sometimes simply unavailable on your date; we'll tell you honestly which.

Small doesn't mean cheap, but it does mean controllable. Cutting a guest list from a hundred and twenty to forty cuts catering, rentals, florals, and the size of everything at once. That's why the all-inclusive micro wedding format works so well on this coast — one predictable price, an actual photographer, and a day that doesn't feel scaled down.

Where couples over-spend: duplicating a rain plan they'd never use, renting furniture the venue already includes, and paying for a second day of setup that better sequencing would have avoided.

Where couples under-spend: photography, and someone to run the day. On a coast where the light is the reason you came and the logistics are the reason it's hard, those are the two things you'll wish you'd funded. Day-of coordination exists precisely so nobody in your family is directing traffic in a gravel pullout in their good clothes.