Chelsea's Postcards

You guys! We’re getting married! This post is long overdue, as we got engaged about 6 months ago, but I am still absolutely over the moon. We got engaged at sunset on the beach at one of my favorite places in the world. It was perfect and I could not be happier!

As soon as we got engaged everyone’s all wedding plans, and I’m all wedding schmedding…where should we go on our HONEYMOON??? Like priorities amiright??!

I initially thought I would plan a simple wedding in the small town where my family has a vacation house. I spent a lot of time there growing up, and it is still our happy place. It is where we got engaged and will hopefully continue to be a favorite place to visit for many years. As soon as I started looking in to planning the wedding there I hit the stress overload QUICKLY. It is a small town, and vendors would have to come from other cities, and it was going to be hard to accommodate the number of people we were anticipating attending in such a small town. I’m in MBA school as I’ve mentioned before, and I work full time, and if we’re being honest wedding planning is not my jam. There are girls who have dreamed of their dress and the flowers and the venue their whole life. I am not that girl.

So I jumped ship, and I can happily report that we decided on a destination wedding in Jamaica. We will be getting married at the Hyatt Zilara in Montego Bay. We are working with a great travel agent who is in the process of booking all of our guest. She spent a lot of time in the beginning asking questions about what we liked and didn’t like from previous vacations and resorts that we had visited, asked a lot of questions about our guests and their needs, and talked to me a little about what I had in mind for the actual wedding. After that conversation she and her team ultimately came up with two resorts that they felt fit the bill. After weighing the pros and cons of each and doing some research we settled on the Hyatt. The travel agent was beyond helpful in this situation. There are SOOOO many resorts that you could choose from and you could literally go crazy trying to dive in to researching them all (Don’t do this I tried). Luckily I have a good friend who works in the travel industry, and also had a destination wedding herself. She suggested this travel agent right away and the rest has been pretty smooth sailing.

The resort has provided a wedding coordinator who is helping to plan all the details. I’ll probably do a few updates on this as the wedding gets closer. But honestly, I just want to have a great time with our family and friends and celebrate. The little details about where they put the flowers and what kind really don’t interest me. I want a white cake with white icing because that seems easy. Being able to pick from food option one, two, or three for the guests was ideal to me. It hasn’t been totally without stress though. We are anticipating about 80-100 guest, and trying to get that many people organized is never simple. Being able to actually spend a few days with all of the people who travel to be with us is one of the best parts to both of us. It always feels so rushed when there is just a few hours for the bride and groom to greet and thank all their guest, so we are hoping to have a little more time to spend actually hanging out with everyone.

And then there’s the honeymoon! We will stay a few days longer in Jamaica at a separate resort for a mini-moon which we are really excited about. But, we both still wanted an actual honeymoon and felt like if we don’t just go ahead a make it happen we will look back and wish we had. The list of places that we wanted to go was oh so long, and we were having a really difficult time narrowing it down to just one spot. However, we feel pretty sure that we have settled on Paris. We will be going in the fall so if you have any recommendations on what to do send them on over.

I’m off to Prague this weekend and from there ago to visit some friends in Switzerland. I’ll also be attempting to ski for the first time in a few years, so wish me luck! If you have any Prague suggestions or even destination wedding planning tips send them my way.