Weddingbee Blog

Venues: St Fransiscus Church; Beach reception on Renaissance Island
Hometown: New York City
Wedding Date: July 26, 2008
Bride’s Dress Designer: Demetrios
Bridesmaids’ Dresses: Butter dress by Nadia
Florist: Provided by the hotel
Photographer: Diana M. Lott Photography
Wedding Coordinator: Juney Jones
Honeymoon: Island hopping in Hawaii
Trash the Dress Location: Various spots along the North Shore of Aruba

Rob & I decided we wanted to do something different. We had gone to a bunch of weddings recently and wanted ours to be unique. After visiting Aruba in January of 2007, we fell in love with Renaissance Island. The Renaissance Aruba Hotel owns a small island ten minutes by boat off the coast! The boat picks you up from the lobby of the hotel and brings you straight there.

Since we are both Catholic, it was important for us to have a Catholic ceremony. Aruba priests will not marry you, so we had to bring down our own priest. The ceremony took place in an old church in town, and it was HOT (no fans or air conditioning)!!! We’re glad we had the ceremony though.

We left the ceremony in a blue convertible VW beetle, fitting for the weather and our wedding colors.

Our guests were taken by the hotel boats to Renaissance Island.

We had a steel band for the cocktail hour.

One of my favorite things at the cocktail hour was the colorful wooden boat sitting in the sand. It was filled with ice and all of the seafood (clams, oysters, shrimp etc) was placed inside the boat.

Our cocktail tables had small fortune tellers on them for guests to “play” with. They were personalized with fun facts about our relationship, wedding, honeymoon, and parents.

The reception took place on the sand amongst lit palm trees. The tables names were a nod to the Papiamento language (native language of Aruba). Guests found their place cards on a line strung between two palm trees detailed with white orchids and crystals.

In lieu of a guestbook, guests signed a coffee table book titled “One Hundred Seashells”.

The island is breathtaking. It has two different sides - one side we utilized for our cocktail hour where flamingos mingled with our guests. The other side “Iguana Island” (yes there are plenty of iguanas running around) was set-up for our reception.

For dinner, the reception site set-up grills on the beach and grilled filet mignon and lobster tails. We also had a seafood paella, Carribean lobster bisque, walnut chicken, ham, island vegetables, and salad all served buffet style.

A bonfire was made a few hours into the reception where guests could snuggle up to keep warm or roast some marshmallows and smores. The cake design was inspired by the waves of the ocean, which were also featured on our invitations.

We also had a dessert buffet including make your own ice cream cones, chilled strawberry margarita soup with goat cheese fritters, banana flambe, coconut napoleon, and banana chibouks. We had so many desserts the servers forgot to cut and serve our wedding cake!

Our wedding was especially special because we got married on Rob’s grandmother’s 91st birthday! We celebrated at our wedding with a cake. Can you believe a 91 year old made the trip to Aruba!

The day after the wedding, we rented a jeep and took our amazing photographers on a bumpy, and wild ride to the North Shore of Aruba. (It’s all off roading!) We did a trash the dress session which was unbelievably fun. We stopped at a tiny church called the Alta Vista Chapel, some rock formations, and some just simply beautiful scenic places. I wore an ivory Nicole Miller dress that I purchased from E-bay for the session.

Our wedding was a blast! A destination wedding worked for us because both of our immediate families were willing to travel and our friends were thrilled to make a vacation out of it. Most of our guests stayed in Aruba from Wednesday until Monday. We set up golfing, fishing, and a bar hopping bus trip on the Kuku Kunuku. It was a week long celebration, and everyone created memories there!

Photography: I loved, loved, loved our photographer! Since, Aruba doesn’t have too many options in terms of vendors and photography was one of the top priorities on our list we decided to find a destination wedding photographer from the states to bring to Aruba. It was more than worth it. Diana did an amazing job capturing the excitement of the day, and the trash the dress session pictures are incredible.

Recommendations: Aruba isn’t like Mexico or Jamaica in terms of it’s popularity for destination weddings. There really aren’t any vendor options - whichever hotel you choose basically provides everything. While we did go to Aruba once after being engaged to meet with the coordinator, all of our planning was done through e-mail. I was constantly emailing pictures and ideas to the coordinator. Some of my visions worked out, some did not. I knew going in, that I had to relinquish all control and “hope” that everything would look and be how I pictured it. If you do plan on doing a destination wedding, be prepared to roll with the punches. Things on the islands run on “island time”. They’re a lot more relaxed than we are, and I found this particularly wonderful when it came to the wedding. Nobody was frantic or stressed and it made for a very stress-free day!