ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain 

If you’re looking for an amazing venue, look no further! Vermont’s hottest wedding venue is ECHO. Great for mommies, daddies, and kiddies. This place has EVERYTHING: built-in decorations; animals in an AZA-certified setting; enough capacity for your big family propagated by your grandparents who grew up in a country with very little comprehensive sex education. Inside is sick — a figure of Champ (the sea monster who’s just like his sibling the Loch Ness Monster except American); interactive exhibits of the fun and educational sort; baby turtles and adult fish. Outside is incredible — you will LOSE IT when you see Lake Champlain at sunset with mountains in the horizon. And! ECHO is a non-profit — you know, that thing where you can feel like your money is going toward cool stuff like education and conservation.

Event coordinators Kelsey and Sabiha will take care of you from beginning to end, running the show on-site so you don’t have to, truly making you feel like a VIP. They’ll hook you up with the tastiest catering company this side of the Mississippi, who will make you cry your own tears when you see how great they are about working with what you may think is an impossible cross-section of budget and requests, but these dream makers can make it happen like less alarming Will-Smith genies. Your guests can test their physical strength or hang out with eels or get upset when they find out from a computer program what they look like as frogs. Air canons, indoor tornados, shipwrecks — and if that isn’t enough for you, you can hit the dance floor and groove with the bubble tower. What’s a bubble tower? It’s that thing that’s a glow-y pole full of bubbles. Also, ECHO will both set up and clean up all of your confetti, pool floats, and cardboard cut-outs so you don’t have to! No password needed to unlock this bonus!

[The Stefon of it all aside — We got married in September 2022, and we still now (November 2022) are getting feedback from guests about what a cool venue it was. Kelsey and Sabiha were so communicative and responsive, and they made the day stress-free. My friend told me he’s used to seeing lots of people in the reception hall at weddings, sitting around, checking their phones — but at some point he went in there and it was almost empty, because it was easy for everyone to find something fun to do. It was really important to me that the wedding was fun for both us and our guests, and ECHO was the perfect location to make that happen.]

We got married at ECHO in October 2022 and were beyond impressed with the beauty of the location, the coordination leading up to the event, and the way everything ran smoothly and easily on the day-of. Kelsey of ECHO was incredibly responsive leading up to the event, made sure to provide concise answers to all of our questions, and was a calm and kind person to work with. We chose this venue because we were planning from out of state and were unable to coordinate a lot of the small details. Between the caterer and the venue, they took the lead on running the show on the day of our wedding. From setting up decorations, to coordinating transitions during the event, to cleaning up at the end of the night– they took care of it all! We felt completely stress-free during our wedding and were able to completely enjoy the party. Our guests LOVED the space (especially the kids!) and had so much fun looking around at the exhibits during our cocktail hour. Many said it was one of the most unique weddings they had been to, and everyone was in awe of the sunset ceremony out on the deck. We wouldn’t change a thing about our ECHO wedding!