Wedding Date on Dec 5, 2015

From The Bride: Greg and I met through a mutual friend, who had pushed for an introduction for well over a year. We were finally introduced at a gathering at our friend's home, and had our first date several weeks later. On the first date, Greg said that he had two prerequisites: 1) I had to love country music and 2) I had to love football. Since attending country music festivals and football games were two of my favorite things, I laughed and said "I think we have a chance." We knew we were eachother's "forever" person by the second date. We share a mutual love of family and the outdoors, and spent the next year travelling to spend time with our network of family and friends, who we lovingly refer to as "our village." We knew that we were meant to be together forever, but it was important to both of us that our loved ones had an opportunity to get to know us as a couple, and believed in our love as much as we did. We were engaged while skiiing on Mt. Bachelor on a gorgeous blue-bird day in December 2015. When we were discussing options of where to hold our wedding, Greg said "I'll marry you in a ditch, I'll marry you under a bridge, I'll marry you in a church . . . I'll marry you anywhere." I responded, "How about the Haiku Mill?" Years before I met Greg, I ran across some photos of the Haiku Mill, and had always thought it would be a magical place for a wedding. Since Greg and I loved the outdoors, it was a perfect spot. Because it was a long trip for a destination wedding, we did not expect many to be able to make it . . . but we had 107 adults and 22 children travel to Maui to join us on our big day. The planning was quite a task, as we hosted a catered welcome reception, coordinated a snorkel trip and luau, hosted a catered rehearsal dinner at Maui Brewing, and hosted a children's party during the wedding dinner so that the adult guests could enjoy their dinner without worrying about kids. We visited Maui 5 months before the wedding and met with the major vendors (caterer, cocktail caterer, photographer, wedding planner). That took a lot of the pressure off of planning once we had the opportunity to meet with the vendors. They were all well renowned for their respective services, and when we met face to face, we realized how amazing they were, and felt like we were in great hands. Two of the most time consuming, but worthwhile tasks were: 1) providing all guests with a digital guest book prior to the wedding that had photos and biographies of each guest, along with the agenda of events for the wedding week. The guests loved it because they had great conversation starters and could recognize faces before they arrived in Maui; and 2) instead of place cards at the table, we hand wrote personal cards to each wedding guest that were enclosed in wooden envelopes and had the calligrapher write each guest's name on the outside of the envelope. The guests loved the cards, as it was a great personal touch and gave us an opportunity to thank them for making such a huge trip to join us on our big day.