My husband and I were married at Camp Lakotah last month. We rented the camp for 4 days and nights…read more We are both wedding/event professionals and wanted an incredibly unique wedding venue. We were thrilled when we discovered Camp Lakotah, but wished we had been better prepared for the reality of hosting a wedding there- so I hope this review is helpful to others who have a similar vision.
I'll start by sharing the positives: Camp Lakotah is gorgeous. It is on a huge piece of property, with massive pine trees, a pristine lake, beautifully-restored buildings, and an authentic 'campy' vibe. We were given a lot of freedom with what we wanted to do (bring in our own caterers, our own alcohol, cook a big group meal on the beach, play music late into the night). The breakfasts and lunches cooked by camp exceeded our expectations- they were great. Our guests had a blast, and will remember it forever.
However, the camp director and owner, Sandy Bartel made me wish we had found a different space to host our celebration. After years of working in the wedding business, I have never encountered such an unreasonable, bitter service professional. I don't think she is evil-spirited as I know how much she loves her camp, the kids, and her dogs.... but somewhere along the way she began to absolutely hate other adults and her behavior continues to cast a shadow on our wedding. It's like she forgot about the $20,000 business transaction we had made, and kept treating us and our guests like we were in debt to her. It is clear that our wedding overwhelmed her.
It was shortly after we agreed on our wedding dates with Sandy last Summer, that I realized I was going to have to rely completely on myself for all logistics regarding the camp. I tried to get ahold of her (phone, text, e-mail) for 3 months to get a contract to sign, and heard nothing back- and finally, after a desperate text telling her we were going to start looking at other venues, she responded "who is this?" Because we loved the venue so much, we decided to sign the contract and keep on planning and communication was slow, but acceptable during this time.
We live 3.5 hours from camp, and visited 4 times before our wedding, each time we visited Sandy was actually great- warm, accommodating, focused. Our wedding began on a Wednesday and she agreed to let us come out on the Monday before the wedding to begin setting up camp. I wrote her an e-mail the week before the wedding outlying our plan for the following week. She called me on Sunday afternoon to tell me that we were absolutely not going to be able to set up until Wednesday, and acted as though she had never talked to us about the Monday arrival (we discussed it at least 3 times). We were in our U-haul, had 3 full days of work ahead of us, and were massively inconvenienced and stressed by having to do all of our set up on Wednesday morning before our first guests arrived at noon.
The wedding week went on, folks were having a blast, the weather was perfect. The camp staff stayed out of our way (which they didn't need to), took care of garbage, set out water- it was nice. They were all quite sweet, however, many guests had very bad experiences with Sandy. A couple friends who used the camp kitchen to make cupcakes (which we paid Sandy $400 to let us do) were treated horribly by her, and my best friend was looking for her phone and was yelled at for investigating a ringing phone (Sandy's) that was sitting in a cart. That crossed a major line with me.
On Sunday morning when we were packing up from the huge event we just threw, Sandy sent me an aggressive text that said they would be locking the gates and we would be forced to leave by 1:00. I dug around in my e-mail to prove that we had agreed on 4:00 as a load out time, and she never responded. But the staff was cold and rude and we tried to do everything as quickly as we could. After being rushed out, we ended up leaving a few items at camp and having to drive the 7 hours round trip to go grab them the following week. We arrived to an empty camp and the most valuable thing we left (a $1500 karaoke machine) was missing. We could not get ahold of Sandy (she had just turned her phone off when she realized I was trying to reach her). After weeks of trying to get in touch, we had to contact the County Police Department who was just finally able to seize the machine and now we get to make another trip to pick it up.
Sandy Bartel was the first person to pop into my head each morning for the last month. She caused me so much anxiety that I still cannot think about our wedding week without my heart rate rising. This would have been a completely different experience had Sandy just charged us to account for the cost of a venue coordinator- someone who enjoys customer service- so we never had to interact with her (and visa versa). We are service people, with great friends, and are very easy to get along with. It should have gone down differently.
