My husband and I have a pretty romantic love story, if I do say so myself. We met in 2007 in Melbourne, Australia while I was on a year-long university exchange and he was living there. I arrived in January, we met in March and by June we were living together. When my year abroad finished in December I reluctantly headed back to Canada and just a few months later Damian followed. When I look back now it all seems crazy but at the time it all just happened so naturally. We’ve now been together for ten years so I guess we made the right decision!
In 2012 Damian surprised me with a weekend trip to Paris, and under the glittering lights of the Eiffel Tower he asked me to marry him, and I said yes (after a few minutes of gawping at him and giggling like an idiot). After a few days of just enjoying our new engagement, the dilemmas of planning our complicated wedding began.
I am from Ottawa, Damian is from Belfast and we had lived in the North West of England for previous four years. Where was the right place to hold the wedding? Do we have two weddings, one in the UK and one in Canada? Should we just elope and be done with the whole thing? After months of agonising and trying to come up with a ‘perfect’ solution we decided that our best option was a destination wedding in the Algarve, Portugal, an area we loved when we visited a few years before and a place that everyone would have to travel to, thereby making it somewhat fair.
Planning Our Travel Themed Wedding in Algarve, Portugal
One of the perks of planning a destination wedding was that we got to make a re-con trip in order to start getting things organised. Any excuse for a holiday! We aren’t by-the-book people so we decided to do most of the planning ourselves rather than go to a resort and have to adhere to a wedding package. This was definitely the more complicated of the two options but we’re so happy with our decision. We ended up with a dream wedding that will never be duplicated by anyone else, which is exactly what we wanted.
When we were planning the wedding it was obvious that it was going to be loosely travel themed, how could it be anything else?! I didn’t want the theme to be overwhelming but it just made sense for our major passion, and the reason that we met in the first place, to be part of our special day. We worked with a local cake and wedding decorator to design the perfect travel theme for the wedding and it couldn’t have turned out more perfectly.
Well, I can only describe things so much and then it’s best done by photos. Enjoy!
Just looking back through the photos makes me feel all the emotions and remember just what an absolutely magical day it was.
Did you have a destination wedding? What made it the perfect choice for you?
A Crafty Traveler | Family and Travel Adventures 
We had a destination wedding in Queenstown, NZ, and it was amazing. Besides the fact that we had to leave Australian to have our (same-sex) wedding, it was one of the best things we’ve ever done. One day we just decided that the next time flights were on sale to a place we could legally do it, then we’d just book it and do it. Was a choice of Queenstown and Hawaii, I think we chose well.
It’s total BS that you had to leave your country to legally get married, but if you had to do it than I can think of no better place than Queenstown! Congratulations! ❤❤❤