Weddingbee Blog

Having a wedding in Italy is great. The food is simply amazing. (Sorry, but you just can’t get food as good as Italian food in Italy.) The atmosphere is jovial. The scenery is wonderful. The history and culture surrounding you are enriching.

Image via Destination-Weddings-Abroad

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WOOOOOOO HOOOOOOO!

It was just a few weeks ago that I thought we wouldn’t be able to afford a cinematographer. Today I can officially announce that Jon from Well Spun Weddings will be filming our wedding!

Let’s start at the beginning. A few months ago I entered a wedding photography/videography package giveaway on Brooklyn Bride. Unfortunately, I didn’t win. However, a few days after the contest ended I was contacted by Christine Best at WSW and asked if I would still be interested in working with WSW. Basically, they asked me what I could afford and, despite my nonexistent budget, they agreed to do it! It obviously doesn’t hurt that Jon will get to spend the weekend in Costa Rica!

To be honest, everyone at WSW has been so A-MAZING! I don’t know anything about film or filming a wedding, but Jon was just super patient and super nice. He explained things that I hadn’t even thought about (e.g., getting there early to get time-lapse film of sunset/sunrise…yeah, that’s how they do that! I just assumed it was all canned film!) and was just really easy to talk to.
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I’ve been having a difficult time deciding exactly what time to have my (our…why do I keep doing that?) ceremony. As you may or may not remember, Mr. Pancakes and I REALLY want to have a morning wedding. Practically, it’ll allow our guests to enjoy their day in Costa Rica. Also, it’ll be the rainy season, and the morning is the best time for a rain-free ceremony. Personally, we love the morning, and we are super impatient (like children on Christmas morning) and don’t want to have to wait all day to get married. Recently, my wedding planner let me know that 9 AM would probably be the best time to have the wedding…and I was a little panicked! I would LOVE to have an early morning wedding. In fact, I used to dream about having a sunrise ceremony. I just loved the idea of starting the day off with a wedding and just spending the whole day celebrating.

The problem is that I don’t want to deal with all the griping and complaining that comes with an early morning wedding. I already feel selfish for choosing a destination wedding, but now to make people get up at eight in the morning on their vacation!?

Then I saw this:

{Source}

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So today I discovered Wedzu via Jenn McMann at Destination Inspiration!! It’s basically Etsy, but JUST for weddings! For all you brides-to-be who’ve know about this and haven’t shared…shame on you! For all you brides-to-be who haven’t been lucky enough to stumble across this site…enjoy!

Here are a few of my favorite items:

{Fingertip Veil - $100}

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Before we started planning a wedding, Mr. G and I needed to have a serious discussion about where we’d like to move to after we’re done with Japan in September. We wrote out a pros (”jobbertunities”) and cons list for each country and talked about all the points. I thought once we’d done this a decision would become clear, but I was just as undecided as ever! I knew I could be happy in either country, but we had to think of things in the long run, which is usually my favorite thing to do. But so many things depend on other things: the economy, health care plans, etc. How can we determine how the economy will be for the rest of the year?

It was a very difficult decision, but Mr. G said he was leaning towards the United States. I asked him to please think about it because it’s a very big decision on his part. We left it at that and maybe and said we’d discuss it more later.

Since we had a better grasp on things, we could start thinking about wedding plans a little more seriously. So exciting!

I really liked the idea of having a Vegas wedding because people get married in Vegas all the time, so the venues out there really know how to make things as easy and stress-free as possible. Planning from all the way over here would be major stress, so the best thing to do is basically pay and show up. And where better to do that than in Vegas! The only real decision was where to hold it, and since we wouldn’t be putting a lot into the decor, we should pick somewhere that we already liked the look of.
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The first three days of our trip to Punta Cana are a blur to me now. While everyone was doing this…

… we were scurrying around doing all the wedding planning we couldn’t do before we actually got to the resort.
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Sometimes there are things that just can’t be put into words, even for a long-winded Bee like me.

So without further ado, here is a quickie photo tour of our wedding resort: the Majestic Colonial in Punta Cana.

I wish I could share with you my own photos of the resort. But that would be impossible. Because, you see, I’ve never been to this resort… which means I’m planning a wedding at a venue I’ve never seen.

All I’ve had to go on are pictures like these:

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Once we had our destination of choice nailed, it was time to pick a resort.

As I flipped through one brochure after another, my eyes began to glaze over at the sight of the same images over and over: 1) photo of woman lounging by pool, 2) photo of woman on wide (and weirdly empty) white sand beach, 3) aerial photo of resort that is indiscernible from aerial photo of other resort on opposite page, 4) swan-shaped towel art displayed on a bedspread which must have been designed by someone who was color-blind.

Since I’m dorky and secretly love research (oh Melvil Dewey, your name still inspires shivers) I went, of course, to the grand World Wide Web…

…and, oh my lord, it was just more of the same schmaltz!

There were pictures of beaches and couples canoodling and 80’s-style wedding dresses with pouffy bangs to match, but not much else except ads, ads, ADS AND MORE ADS!

Unless you really like ads, I’d say do yourself a favor and don’t try Googling ‘destination weddings’.
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Weighing all the options for wedding destinations can be, admittedly, enormously overwhelming.

We found that the best place to start after asking ourselves these questions was to talk to friends and family that had been to the various Caribbean destinations we wer\ sort-of considering.

This kind of candid feedback can sometimes be incredibly helpful since it’s honest and trustworthy. However, if you want some advice based on personal experience, don’t ask too many people for their opinions. Not because you don’t love them all equally (obviously you do, or want them to think so, anyway) but if you don’t, you’ll just get massively, massively confused. It’s like going into Sephora when you want to try a new brand of mascara. GAHHH! They all sound so wonderful, how do you pick just one?!

If at this point you have already found a travel agent to work with, by all means do ask for his/her thoughts…but not before you have some sort of idea of what YOU want first. Trust me, it will make it easier for both of you.
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I’m thinking that regular readers of Weddingbee, especially Mrs. Lovebird’s fans, will have no problem answering this question, but for those out there like me who were totally clueless (which, by the way, is one of the. best. movies. made. ev-ah) before diving into this whole wedding scene, let’s just take a moment to make sure we’re on the same page.

Destination Wedding* (děs’tə-nā’shən wěd’ĭng) n. Also known as “DW”.

1. A celebration of love that takes place in a location other than the bride and groom’s current place of residence.

2. An amazingly fun excuse to get your closest friends and family together for a week-long get-to-know-you gathering.

3. A slightly sneaky, but completely gratifying, way for someone who wants their wedding day to last FOREVER to stretch the festivities from the usual 12-48 hours to a deliciously extravagant 168 hours.

* Source: the unofficial dictionary of Sea Breeze-isms
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One of the biggest pieces of green wedding advice that I have read, is to reduce the amount of travel (especially air travel) due to its impact on the environment.

No Planes!

As you have probably figured out, this is a piece of green advice that we did not follow. We are having a destination wedding and 55 of the 60 guests will need to fly to San Francisco. I wish that we could have had a local wedding, but this just wasn’t an option for us. My family lives in Minnesota, Mr. PN’s family lives on the East coast and our friends are all over the country. We decided early on that the only way to make everyone happy was for everyone to travel. We had dreamed about getting married in Napa Valley and we knew the perfect venue to bring together our family and friends.
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So you’ve decided to have a DW (destination wedding). Every night, images of sandy beaches, turquoise seas and hurricanes- no wait, that was just me- er…swaying palm trees fill your dreams.

With a spring in your step and a sparkle in your eye, you trip on into your local travel agent’s office where HORROR OF HORRORS, they weigh you down with 20 pounds of catalogues detailing vacation packages in every single Caribbean island under the sun!

Where do you even start?!?

Well I’m not going to beat around the bush here: if you’ve never actually been to any of these potential destinations (like yours truly), what you’re about to encounter is NOT a cake-walk.
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Part I 

Mr. Lovebird and I are getting legally married at City Hall in New York before our wedding in front of friends and family in Cancun. I think it was the lawyer side of me talking since I don’t want the hassle of having a Mexican marriage certificate, which I would have to get translated and Apostilled each time I would need it. But the ultimate deal breakers were the blood tests. Me no likey needles…

source
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It’s been a challenge trying to plan a wedding from 500 miles away. Each weekend trip back to Maine must be carefully planned for maximum vendor-visiting potential. (I believe it was Miss Lovebug who coined the appropriate term vendor bender.) I really wouldn’t have it any other way though- I can’t imagine getting married anywhere but my home state.
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The Department of Tourism invited me and a couple of other wedding magazine/website editors to come visit the Cayman Islands last weekend on a press trip. Not only was it a fantastic opportunity to mingle with some of the top people in the biz, we got to spend 4 days in the beautiful Cayman Islands! What an honor for weddingbee to be invited!

The island is clean, safe, beautiful, and the people are so friendly… I had an absolutely fantastic time, and would definitely love to visit again with Mr. Bee.

Now I’ll start off with the water excursions, because I got to experience a lot of things I’d never done before. On Saturday, our free day, I went snorkeling in Stingray City with Red Sail Sports. I purchased an underwater camera case for my digital camera for about $60 off ebay before the trip. Totally worth it! I got some amazing pictures and videos, and I’m sure to use it over and over again - a must have if you’re going to be participating in water sports on your honeymoon.

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