Weddingbee Blog

A couple hours after the meltdown (and possibly an El Presidente later), I had calmed right down and set my sights on the final things on our to-do list. After all, the show must go on!

The most important of these was the rehearsal.

I had never really given a rehearsal much thought, to tell you the truth. Even though I’m normally a type-A personality, I had enough sense to know that a destination wedding would be more relaxed. However, about a month before the wedding (right about the time I discovered I had a bone fracture in my foot, remember that? Ha!) I was out for a walk with my SIL and she changed my mind. She was reminiscing about her own wedding and said that even though hers was also a pretty simple affair, she really wished they had done a rehearsal because it just would have made things go that much more smoothly, you know? Since she’s one of the smartest gals I know, I took her advice.

When we met with our wedding coordinator Sandra, we asked her about the rehearsal, and to our surprise she told us that a rehearsal was unnecessary and that she didn’t normally do them.

Um, what?

“You’ll just line up and I’ll be there to tell you when to go,” she said.

At which point I looked at Mr Breezy, raised one eyebrow (yes, ’tis a talent that I always have possessed) and said, “Okay then. We’ll do our OWN rehearsal.”
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They say that no wedding would be complete without a meltdown. Knowing this, I was determined to be the very first bride not to go down that path. And in fact, excepting a few minor (relatively speaking) flare-ups, I kept it together right up until the very end.

And then The Incident happened.

The day before the wedding, Mr Breezy and I were enjoying a rare moment of pre-wedding down time with our friends. We were on the beach and Mr Breezy decided he’d use this opportunity to go to the market just down the road from the resort to buy some cigars. He enlisted his friend J to accompany him and they left, saying they were going to drop by the room first to grab some cash. He asked me if I wanted him to take anything with him back to the room. I said, “No thanks, we’re fine,” and they were off.

About half an hour later, I changed my mind and decided to go back to the room after all.

I opened the door to our gigantic suite and dumped my beach bag on the floor. And as I walked in towards the lounge area of our room, I spotted something out of the corner of my eye.

Something in the bedroom.

Something big.
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Some of our closest friends and family aren’t ‘close’ at all. From Montreal to New York to Hong Kong, they’re scattered all over the place. This is a big reason why we chose to have a destination wedding, but it’s also the reason why we didn’t have stag/stagette parties.

We figured we’d just throw something together (easy-breezy style, yo) once we got to Punta Cana. So on the Saturday before our Monday wedding, we spread the word that the guys and gals were going to dinner separately. Little did I know that Mama SB, my amazing sister-in-law and a couple of my girlfriends had been conspiring all along to throw me a mini bridal shower too. Yay! A showerette!

We gathered together for champagne toasts and then did something I absolutely LOVED:

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Being a total wedding-porn addict (yes, I am in a 12 step program), I was hell bent on having gorgeous photography of our wedding day. It was, however, also the one thing on my earliest to-do list that caused me the most stress.

You see, I absolutely fell in love with the engagement shots we had done by James Day, photog extraordinaire, and lovely person to boot. Naturally we looked into having him do our wedding too, but sadly, he was in Australia at the time. That’s a long ways away from the Dominican Republic and flying him in was not within the realm of our photography budget (though if it were an option, I think I’d have seriously considered stuffing him into one of OUR suitcases). I seriously envy the couples that get to work with him though. Really. You should check him out.

So anyways, where was I? Ah yes. The hunt for a photographer was on.

Like most resorts that do weddings, the Majestic Colonial resort has its own photographer. And of course like most brides, this was the first option I considered. But truth be told, I wasn’t crazy about some of the work I’d seen and I wasn’t a fan of the packages; 50 prints (not originals—prints!!) just wouldn’t cut it for me.

I then thought, well maybe we could find a photographer in Punta Cana that does destination weddings.
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Okay. So. Ahh… (digging her toe in the dirt). There’s, um, something I have to tell you.

It’s actually not a big deal.

Well, it sorta is. Actually, it wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, then it sort of turned into a sort of deal, more a medium deal than a big one, though. To us, anyway.

Mr Breezy and I were “officially” married a month before we left for Punta Cana.

Yep. One day in early October, Mr Breezy called his mom and said, “Hey Ma, whatcha doin’ tomorrow?… Is it ok if we get married at your house?”

So that day, straight after work, we went to Mr Breezy’s parents’ house and got married. (I will forever remember that it was a Tuesday because when I suggested Thursday, Mr Breezy said, “I can’t get married on Thursday - Smallville’s on.”)

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The two parts of our on-site planning that I thought I was fully prepared for were the flowers and the cake.

When it comes to flowers for destination weddings, there are basically three options:

1. Order flowers through the resort’s wedding coordinator (they have their own supplier)
2. Find your own supplier, buy flowers and create your own bouquets
3. Get artificial flowers made at home and take them with you in your luggage

Since I wanted real flowers and had seen some photos of beautiful bouquets the resort had organized, I went with Option 1. I printed out and brought some examples along with me to discuss with Mama Breezy:

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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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I’m just going to hit pause on the recaps here for a sec and go into a bit more detail on the Out of Town bags we created for our guests, as several of you wanted to know where we got them from.

But first, here are some shots of our wedding-branded goodies in action:

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Once we got settled into our rooms, I couldn’t wait to get outside and do a whole lot of NUTHIN’. Unfortunately, Mr Breezy had other plans. Uh… that came out wrong. What I meant was, there was a whole lot of unpacking to do… of OOT (Out Of Town) bags for our guests.

Remember the logo/monogram thingy that we made? Well, here’s what we used it for…

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Although our flight to the Dominican Republic was long, it was (thankfully) pretty uneventful. We stepped off the plane eagerly, our eyes soaking up all the lush greenness and… uh… thatched roofs? Yup, that’s the Punta Cana airport:

We got our luggage - none of which went missing, thank goodness! - and found our tour operator’s booth where a representative directed us to a waiting bus.

We then embarked on a bumpy 45 minute ride to the Majestic Colonial Resort. I was so antsy to get to the place I had been reading and researching about for the past 10 months that it was all sort of a blur. My bridesmaid Miss P had more of her wits about her and snapped some shots.
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Once at the airport, we almost immediately ran into the other Vancouverites on our flight to Punta Cana—Mr Breezy’s sister and her husband and kids, and two couples who were friends of Mr Breezy’s parents. We had sixty confirmed guests for our destination wedding in the Dominican Republic but everyone else (except MIL & FIL who left earlier) was flying out of other cities—Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Miami and Hong Kong, to be exact.

The airport thing went off without a hitch and we were soon en route. Or sort of.

It’s at this point that I have to make a confession. I’m not gonna lie: in my daydream state, I sometimes thought about what it was going to be like to be in the airport and getting on the plane carrying this big ol’ white bag which so obviously carried a wedding dress. I had been anticipating the moment for a year, and with my over-active imagination, of course I was going to dream about it.

I pictured walking through the airport all grinning and glowy-like, catching glimpses out of the corner of my eye of people smiling fondly and maybe even a bit wistfully at us, the Bride and Groom (yes, that’s Bride with a capital B). Some elderly couples would touch our arms and say, “Oh congratulations, you lovely young couple,” and maybe some funny family would pose for a photo. People would ask us when the wedding day was and wish us all the best.

Yeah. Well. It was a dream, all right.
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It’s hard to believe that it’s been a month and a half since we left Canada for two supremely amazing wedding weeks in Punta Cana. We have finally settled down into a comfortable groove again and though our tans have faded, the memories we made never will. You know what that means: It’s finally time to recap the Breezys’ Destination Wedding in the Dominican Republic, a.k.a. DW in the DR.

Punta Cana, here we come!

It will probably come as no surprise that the last few days before our departure were HECTIC. I actually fully expected to tear my hair out because I just knew there were so many things that wouldn’t fall into place before the very last minute (isn’t that always the case?), but the situation was worse than even I had imagined.

As (bad) luck would have it, Mr Breezy was launching a big campaign at work right before we left which meant he had to pull some looooong hours at the office and so I was largely on my own. Three days before our flight, somewhere in between me running around town getting last minute things and hyperventilating into a brown paper bag, Mr Breezy basically opened the door to the guest room (our designated Wedding Disaster Area), threw a bunch of clothes in there and said, “Good luck, honey. Don’t forget to pack anything.” Considering I had not only our own stuff to pack but also OOT bags and contents for 60 guests, this was no small feat.
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I love love LOVE the holidays. Yes folks, I am one of those freaks who, much to the (very vocal) chagrin of her coworkers, busts out the Christmas cheer mid-November. Lucky for them, this year I was away getting married mid-November, so they got an extra-long respite from Burl Ives’ rendition of Silver and Gold, and hallways festooned with chintzy dollar-store tinsel.

Me & friends at the office last year
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One thing about being away for two weeks for a destination wedding that I hadn’t anticipated is allllll the million and one things I have to catch up on. It’s crazy! So that’s what I’ve been up to all last week. Don’t worry, I’m almost done… and what’s more, I just spoke to our photographer today who said he put our pro pics in the mail today (how amazingly fast was that?!) so my recaps will start sooner than you think.

In the meantime, I just HAD to share something that I saw while getting caught up on my Google Reader items last night. It’s from Post Secret - if you’re not familiar with Post Secret, basically it’s a project where people anonymously write their deepest, darkest secrets on a postcard and mail them to Frank Warren who publishes them on a website (and more recently, as books).

So here’s the postcard that intrigued me:
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Hola hive! The Breezys are back from their destination wedding extravaganza in Punta Cana, all tanned and blissed out and… MARRIED!

Photo by our awesome friend Kuba G.

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