Our Vintage Florida Wedding – We Got Hitched!
So we have been missing in action on this blog for a while, but we’ve had a really good excuse: We got married!
With working full-time, planning the wedding, and trying to get some work done on the house, we’ve been going nonstop, but our wedding week was such a wonderful time to just relax and enjoy our friends and family. When we originally got engaged, we knew that many of our guests would have to travel no matter where we held the event. We figured we might as well hold it somewhere that people could really make a vacation out of. We chose Dunedin, Florida because it was close to where many of our relatives already lived, and we have vacationed down there many times before.
Dunedin (pronounced “Done Eatin”, ha ha) is home to Honeymoon Island. Though it sounds like a resort location or something off of a bad reality TV show, Honeymoon Island is nothing of the sort. It is actually a state park full of beaches, hiking trails, mangroves, and the occasional rattlesnake. We decided to do a small wedding on one of the beaches at Honeymoon Island. The park has event planners they work with to set up the weddings and they take care of putting up all the chairs and the alter, as well as putting the decorations out. They were really easy to work with and we were so happy with the way everything worked out.
As far as the wedding planning, my mom did so much to help, from talking to vendors to making the chair hanger decorations and staining the crates for our table decorations at the reception, so a big “Thank You” goes to her. We worked with a local florist, Save the Date Florida, to add some floral decorations to the beach venue, our reception tables, and our wedding cake. They did a beautiful job! I also designed and assembled the wedding programs that doubled as fans.
Our theme was vintage Florida and it allowed us to really have fun with some little details. Michael wore a flamingo tie and blue canvas shoes. I had a birdcage veil and wore blue pumps. We also encouraged the men involved in the wedding to wear different Floridian ties and socks. The guests were ferried back and forth from the hotel to the beach on a vintage trolley, and we also carried the theme over to the reception with vintage postcards, orange crates, and even blow-up flamingo can coozies. Though it was a beautiful wedding, we had fun with it.
We were really lucky to have a talented photographer friend take our wedding photos. He has done sports, fashion, and other professional photo shoots so we knew we were in good hands. He’s also just a great guy and we were psyched that he could attend the wedding as our friend, so getting him to shoot the photos was just an added bonus. He took some amazing photos, some of which you can see below, where he (Steven Earl Yang) is credited. Thanks Steve!
The reception was held at Bon Appetit Waterfront restaurant in the upstairs banquet hall. It has a vintage feel to the entire room and a beautiful view of the ocean. It was a perfect location to hold our reception. It is also connected to a hotel where most of our guests were staying. The staff and event planner, Nancy Williams, were so wonderful and helpful, and they really made it a relaxing and enjoyable night. Because it is also located near downtown Dunedin, we decided to have a pub crawl after the event so that we could continue the party and get more time to visit with our friends and family. Overall, it was the perfect way to cap off the day and celebrate the event.