Wedding Dress Shopping FAILS

Blast from the past post! This was originally at Weddzilla but I wanted to share it here!!!

So my first Dress Day back in October with my parents and Shawn in Lincoln, NE was a total bust. We went to 4 places and the grand event of the day was buying Shawn's shoes, not a wedding dress!

The first place we went was an outlet (NOT Nebraska Bridal Outlet... we love them and they're in Wahoo, NE) and they had a list 10 miles long of rules for entering their grungy tin building full of dirty sample dresses.

"NO STROLLERS.
NO SHOES
NO FOOD
NO DRINKS
NO BATHROOM
NO PICTURES
NO SKETCHING."

Sure none of them are "nice" but the last two? A little unrealistic...
Besides, who would sketch?! Plus the shoes thing... that didn't settle with me well because I was wearing my Minnetonka fringe boots... no one gets those but me! I made the lady put them behind the counter out of public. We received no help and frankly I didn't want to try on the dresses because they were SO dirty! It was gross. I'm not that fussy but I wouldn't want to wear a sample that had been tried on so many times that it was dirty from all the fit-checks.
 I can't believe they sell off the rack with some of those samples. Then you'd have to pay for the dress, the alterations, AND a cleaning. Not for me!

Then we went to Ellyne Bridal. Polar opposite experience here. You still had to remove your shoes, but in every other way this is the Kleinfeld's of Nebraska. The staff greeted us and introduced themselves and asked what we were looking for. They didn't have my Watters dress I wanted to try, but they had Pronovias, Jim Hjelm, Wtoo and more! I was stunned at the selection of Better dresses. Of course I knew I wouldn't be able to afford any of the dresses but the experience was once in a lifetime. We received a handwritten thank you from the associate who helped us the next business day. So they had to have mailed it THAT DAY. Wow!

We tried to go to David's Bridal but apparently they're so... exclusive that we couldn't go in past the "guard" that day (even though I just wanted to show my mother one dress that I could go and point out)! It's the Walmart of wedding; certainly not Kleinfelds... get real! That turned me off to DB for a wedding dress along with the other experiences I had there {Sidestory: One time I went back to DB to show my FMIL one dress I forgot to try on when I went alone and I couldn't find the lady who was helping me. When I found her again she was rolling her eyes at my questions when she didn't think I was looking. Is a simple question about adding straps really that stupid?}.

The last one was Azureite Bridal. Their ad intrigued me but man, were they hard to locate! GPS doesn't know where they are so we ended up driving around the same block of streets for 20 minutes calling them and trying to figure out where they were. When we finally got there, no one was there except for the family that owns it. They have gorgeous prom + b-maids' dresses, but most of their bridal gowns were expensive and heavily beaded. They were gorgeous, but I wasn't looking for a gown that weighs 25+ pounds from crystal beading. We were in and out in 5 minutes.
I was so frustrated after this day. Every store you leave without a dress just adds to the mounting feeling of pressure. It's gives you the literal sensation of trying to find the needle in the haystack. The needle's just a white dress in a sea of them. I just focused on the experience of Ellyne Brial as being the positive and moved on.
As we all know, my time came the next month in November, and we found My Dress in the most serindipitous of ways...