Feb. 16, 2005

Weddings on wheels

By Kirk Sibbald
ksibbald@uwo.ca

It has a drive thru-window. The uncarpeted lobby is filled with balloons. And the chaplain is a fun-loving woman who can't get enough of the Las Vegas night-life.

No, it may not be your typical wedding chapel, and Dale Brewster isn't your average ordained minister, but that hasn't stopped hundreds of couples from getting married at the Crystal Wedding Chapel in London, Ont.

Brewster, a consummate entrepreneur, opened Canada's first drive-thru wedding chapel almost three years ago. She's also the owner of Balloons To Go, a 26-year-old business that caters to any special event.

The summer the chapel opened at 227 Wharncliffe Rd. S., Brewster says she was conducting about one wedding ceremony a week. Twelve months later, she was marrying one couple a day.

"Nowadays, it's not unusual for us to have two or three couples in a day," says Brewster, 52. "We get people from one end of the country to the other, and also from the States."

The drive-thru, closed for the season, will reopen to happy couples in the spring.

While many choose the drive-thru option as a gimmick, time and money are also factors. Ceremonies at the window are generally over in 20 minutes, and the cost is a mere $199.

The chapel offers a variety of other packages as well, all for a fraction of the cost of traditional weddings. Most popular is 4EverMore, a ceremony complete with flowers, candles, romantic music and 24 pictures on a CD-ROM for $399.

And with the chapel itself being somewhat out of the ordinary, so too are many of the couples it serves. Pretty much anything goes – from rap music to gothic weddings. Brewster says one couple even came to the drive-thru on Halloween in a flatbed truck, with the bride-to-be lying in a coffin.

This is not to say, however, that the chapel isn't popular with more conventional partners.

"People might think it's just tacky and for strange people, but that's not true," Brewster says. "It's really quite cute and adorable, and, best of all, it's really easy-going. People can be in and out in under an hour."

And this hassle-free environment was reason enough for Adam and Laura Craig to choose the chapel for their wedding on Feb. 5.

"It was really a last minute decision," Laura says. "I'm American and my husband's Canadian, and in order to get the (citizenship) paperwork going, we wanted to get married quickly."

Laura, 22, and Adam, 23 – both education students at the University of Western Ontario – chose to marry in front of 12 friends and family members with Brewster's Daisy package, a $269 ceremony that lasted 20 minutes.

Photo courtesy of Crystal Wedding Chapel

Dale Brewster, left, presents Adam and Laura Craig with their wedding certificate.

Brewster was married in a Las Vegas wedding chapel 14 years ago, and after traveling to the city that never sleeps almost every year for two decades, she finally decided to bring a piece of the Vegas strip to Canada.

After opening the chapel, Brewster was ordained through a non-denominational process that took nearly two years. Although she now conducts most of the chapel's weddings, she also has five other ministers who fill in.

Brewster says her long-term plans include making the Crystal Wedding Chapel a Canada-wide franchise, and she's also eyeing a new building for the chapel in London.

"There's an old Wendy's building just down the street that I'm looking at," she says with a grin. "And that'd be great, because it already has a drive-thru window."