John,
Welcome to the boards.
Your wife is absolutely right. I can assure you if its astrophotography your after, you would eventually be looking to upgrade from a fork mount. Best get it right first time. The CPC11 is very good, but for photography, a fork mount will just give you too much grief.
The CGE mount is excellent. I've only had it a couple of weeks, however my initial tests have exceeded all my expectations. The mount can happily take a C14 so a C11 will be no problem plus you will have plenty of spare capacity for extra equipment such as cameras guidscopes etc if you wish to use these.
I hope to do some tests later today so that I can quantify just how good it really is. I'll post those results here when I have them.
The Celestron OTA's are very good too. A C11 would strike me as the ideal scope for a CGE mount.
Now saying all that the CGE mount is not light, it's still portable but just about on the limit. Mine is permanently mounted in an observatory. I can't say I'd fancy lugging it in and out of doors every evening.
However, ou could look at it another way;
The CGE11 has three main parts, the tripod, the mount, and the scope. I'd be pretty sure that each component on it's own weights less than the CPC11 scope and fork assembly (which can't be separated). So for portability, your probably slightly better off with the CGE11.
Best of luck with whatever you decide.
  