Life in the hospitality and wedding industry.

“Green dragonflies symbolize growth, renewal, and harmony. Their presence encourages us to embrace change and welcome new beginnings. The green dragonfly reminds us that change is a natural part of life and can lead to profound personal growth.”

Why Green Dragonfly Dreams as the name of my blog and why blog? Well, that’s a long story but one worth telling, incrementally of course, in order to understand the “why” behind my writing. Below is a part of that story.

My name is Lyndsey Greenland and I own and operate Rolling Rails Lodge with my family. Our wedding and event venue is located in the mountains of central Pennsylvania just 10 minutes from Penn State University. My husband is Shaun Greenland, his family started in the construction industry 30 some years ago and in 2016 we purchased land and built the dream. Disclaimer: this dream was 100% financed by the bank, it was well beyond our reach, but the bank took a chance on us based solely on a remarkably high credit score and other rental property assets. Our local building material store also took a chance on us, loaning us material to start the build without the ability to pay right away. A friend and previous customer did the same, offering up blind support of our dream and loaned us a great deal of money, “pay me back when you can”. We are forever grateful to all of them. We owed a lot of money, an uncomfortable amount of money, we handed over pink slips for our construction equipment/work trucks and handed out “I Owe You’s” like candy. We had no clue what we were doing but we knew how to design and build a structure. That’s all we needed right? “Build it and they will come” that infamous motto was at the forefront of our minds, but little did we know, we were in over heads so-to-speak in the world of hospitality. We made promises to host weddings for the following year before even breaking ground on the venue. We offered up sketch drawings of the venue and trekked potential clients through the woods and pointed out to the views of the rolling hills on our mountainside property. “Just picture, envision, trust us, this will be spectacular”. Those aren’t phrases to throw around lightly when dealing with arguably the most important day of someone’s life. But we did, we made our bed, we forced a hard deadline, and it was time to get to work. No strangers to working hard, my husband and his father hit the ground running, designing and sending blueprints to a local log home kit manufacturer. The dream of a lodge wedding venue was becoming a reality.

We constructed the venue through the winter of 2017, lucking out with amazing weather. We hit 75 degrees in February during the week we framed the massive roof trusses. Things, however, wouldn’t always be that smooth and we hit several bumps in the road. Fear, doubt, exhaustion, it was all so overwhelming. Every day that we pulled up to the construction site was another gut punch reminder of how much we still had to do, and the possibility of catastrophic failure was very real.

It was June 14, 2017. Our first wedding was 3 days away and I was in full blown panic mode, so much to do, so little time. I was corresponding with the bride assuring her that all would be perfect, but I really knew I was just trying to reassure myself. Shaun and I were standing in the middle of the main hall of the venue, trying to entertain our two young toddlers and calm ourselves down from inescapable panic. Shaun’s dad hollered from across the venue, “Hey guys, look what I found!” He held out his hand and there it was, the green dragonfly.

I had never seen a dragonfly up close like that. It had big blue eyes that took up its entire face and a beautiful bright green body with shades of brown mixed in. It was incredible, and at the time I remember thinking, is this a sign? Are we going to be okay, is it all going to work out? I leaned into that thought and I told myself it had to be a sign. This was our sign, from the universe, from source, from God, whatever you want to call it. We were going to be okay, and we were on the right path.

We had our first wedding 3 days later on June 17, 2017, and since then have hosted over 300 weddings and events at our venue and are still figuring out the world of hospitality as we go.

I won’t lie, the skeptic in me started to creep in and this idea of the visit from the green dragonfly being anything more than mere coincidence stared to dominate my thoughts. That was until I realized that dragonfly symbol kept popping up everywhere I looked at our venue. The guest cabin, known now as the Delaney House, had dragonfly magnets plastered all over the screen doors and the refrigerator. They were placed there by the previous owner, and the color of the magnets, well, they were green of course. While cleaning the venue one day I took a quick sip from our water fountain and looked down, taking notice to a knot in the wood that was in the perfect shape of a dragonfly. There are thousands of knots in the wood of our venue, but this stood out like a flashing neon light shouting “HERE IS YOUR SIGN!”

According to Jill Gleeson from Country Living Magazine “Dragonflies also can specifically symbolize self-awareness, self-love and embracing your own personal power… ” I always wanted to chronicle our journey of dreaming big, jumping in headfirst and figuring it out as we go in the world of hospitality and weddings. I know I’m late to the game, as we have been at this wedding thing for 7 years now. However, I am by nature a super shy and very private person, but this is a start and I’m taking that leap and putting myself out there. Jumping into big dreams headfirst with my confident and passionate “Leo” of a husband has always been easier. I support him in the background, and he goes out and conquers whatever he sets his mind to with impeccable work ethic and unwavering self-belief. I always did the work behind the scenes and let him take the lead. I’m a Pisces, my forte is to creatively imagine up the biggest most magnificent dreams and then self-doubt those dreams to death. I’m working on it, slowly, but I’ve come to realize that the hospitality industry, the wedding industry and life in general are all the same, you do your best and you figure it out as you go. My hope for all of you out there reading this is that you go after those dragonfly dreams. I hope you can embrace the beauty in not only the wins but also the failures along the way, there will be many, but it’s worth it.