The Gathering Tree

In summary the Gathering Tree in China Springs Texas seems like a beautiful place to share the happiest day of your life with your partner, friends and family. This could not be farther from the truth. The cabins are a mess with mold, bugs both dead and alive, dirt and dust, and no running water. The only power underneath beautiful tree was a dilapidated F-150 running an invertor. A very common theme with the owner of this venue is binge drinking, stumbling, short- and long-term memory loss, and general incoherentness. The morning of the rehearsal dinner seemed fine enough when we talked on the phone to go over plans with the owner. Upon arriving for our rehearsal dinner the owner was shocked to see us and said that he did not know that we were having one. This meant that we had neither of the tents that we paid for, no tables, no chairs, no water, and no power. This had set a damper on the mood but we made the best of the bad situation and we preserved through and we were willing to give a second chance to have the tents up in the morning. I cannot stress how wrong that we were for doing that. The next morning we knock the bugs off and go down to the tree for a progress report with the owner. Upon our arrival the owner is stumbling with no shirt on screaming at his “help”. We are told that the tents will be up by 12-12:30 and we had no reason to be worried. Come noon the wedding party is starting to arrive and everyone is getting antsy to get tables and chairs in place for the pictures that are supposed to take place at 2. At 2pm, we find the owner has now gotten his skid steer down, ripped up the turf that was laid out, and tore the grass up. The helper was incredibly rude and said that we had no business being down there, and we were the reason that things were taking so long, and it had nothing to do with the empty Keystone Light and Twisted tea cans everywhere. The wedding party has a meeting to discuss our options and the owner completely looses his composure. He proceeds to throw down the items that were in his hand and get in everyone’s faces screaming profanities saying that we are hindering progress by not setting up the tents ourselves. He even claimed that all the groomsmen should have been out two weeks ago helping him prepare everything and that they were the laziest, most sorry excuse for groomsmen that he has seen. With a staggering amount of patience we avoided the physical altercation that he desperately wanted and head to the suite to inform the girls that we need to leave as the owner is drunker than normal and is looking to fight someone. As everyone is loading the vehicles with all of our items the owner swings back by and is screaming at everyone saying that we have ruined everything for the bride by our lack of tent preparation skills. In the midst of his drunken rambling he manages to not only call the bride a b****, try to secure the brides grandmother for a date, and prepare a sobriety test for himself which he handily failed. In the end we called the sheriffs department and gave them a brief summary of the events and told them that we had not seen him sober and wished them the best of luck dealing with him. The sheriffs responded with “Sir we haven’t ever seen him sober either”. In summary, do NOT let anyone you know or love have their wedding at this “venue” the owner is a lying, scamming, aggressive, incoherent drunk that will very likely repeat these same actions again and again until he is stopped.