Jenn79

That is a beautiful dress, very unique! You look amazing.

I've been trying to come up with something a little fancier, but here's what I have for now. I just wanted to say, everyone's pictures look so nice!

Congratulations! Best wishes to mommy, daddy, and the new baby!

I couldn't find anything I really liked in any of the stores, so my mother-in-law made it. We went shopping for the pattern and the material, and she had it finished in less than a week. To this day, our flower girl still calls it her "princess dress'. flower girl.doc

We cruised to Bermuda for our wedding, then went to Disneyworld for 8 days after we returned home. I had never been to Disney, and my husband hadn't been since he was a kid, so it was a wonderful experience for both of us. I loved "being" 5 years old again!

I just wanted to let any of you brides who have worn or are planning to wear a Maggie Sottero dress, you can have your story published on their site. Mine is up right now: MaggieSottero.com - Maggie Brides. I find I spend far too much time looking through all the different stories, I love seeing the dresses "in action"!

Thank you jilly76 for the shout out! Kathryn99: A place that is great for honeymooners is the Cambridge Beaches. It's an adults only resort, so the privacy factor goes up a great deal. They offer dinner on the beach and have beautiful grounds. Check out their website: Bermuda Vacation, Bermuda Hotel, Bermuda Resort, Bermuda Vacation Package, Luxury Spa Vacation Another place you might want to look into if you are more active is the 9 Beaches Resort. They have small cottages on stilts over the water, and are known for a very laid back style. 9 Beaches Bermuda Resort I agree with jlink78 about The Reefs, it is a beautiful property with AMAZING food, in close proximity to the South Shore beaches. Any place you choose in Bermuda is amazing though. Good luck in your planning!

When I was younger my father was in the military and was posted to Bermuda twice, so for me, it was more about the feeling of going home to get married. We chosed the Coco Reef Resort for our wedding, due to the beautiful wooden walkway down to the beach. The first time I saw it online I knew that was where I wanted to get married. coco reef.doc

One that I haven't seen mentioned yet is my favourite Bob Marley, Is This Love. It's upbeat, it's fun, and it's all about love.

Here are a few more: Waiting for a Star to Fall - Boy Meets World (I love this one) Someone Else's Star - Bryan White Norther Star - Melanie C. Allstar - Smashmouth New Star - Tears for Fears

Our reason is going to reveal my inner geek... I'm a really big Star Wars fan, and we had decided almost from the beginning that we would go to Disneyworld on our honeymoon. Well, Disney's MGM Studios has traditionally done Star Wars themed weekends from mid-May to mid-June, and since 2007 would be the 30th anniversary of the original release of the original Star Wars, we planned the wedding around that. Sadly, I did not manage to make it to Star Wars weekends, because, being the 30th anniversary, all the stars who would normally make appearances were busy with other anniversary appearences, so Disney pushed their weekends forward for the entire month of June. My fiance suggested we change our wedding and honeymoon plans as well, but I was more excited about the wedding than the Star Wars...well, mostly. :-)

I know I'm going to sound crazy, but the fifteen minutes leading up to the start of the wedding were incredibly surreal, almost like I was watching everything rather than being a part of it. I walked through the hotel lobby, I was handed my bouquet, and I headed out onto the walkway that would lead down to the beach, but I don't remember feeling the floor beneath my feet. Then I looked down to the beach, and saw the guests, the chairs, the ocean, and my fiance facing away from where I was. Almost the second I looked up, he turned around, and from that moment on I'm not sure I saw anything but his face as he watched me walk towards him. I saw him take a deep breath, which I knew meant he was trying not to cry, and all I could do was smile to myself. It seemed to only take a second to get to the end of the aisle where he took my hand, and it was the best feeling in the world to finally be where we were.

I wasn't too fussy with what my girls decided to wear. I told them the colour and let them have their fun. I can't remember where they got them, but I think my BM (holding hands with the flower girl) got hers at J Crew. My MOH teaches salsa dancing and is constantly ordering new dresses online, so she already had a dress in the right colour. dresses.doc

We used the song More by Harry Connick Jr. It was originally done by Frank Sinatra, but his version is much faster than Harry's. We stumbled upon it about a week after we got engaged in 2005, when he was performing at Jazz Fest and he opened with this song.

We had planned to have the bridesmaids walk down the aisle to the opening verse of All I Want is You, and for the bride to walk down the aisle to Answer by Sarah McLachlan. Unfortunately, the cd player was experiencing technical difficulties, so we ended up walking down the aisle to the roar of the ocean, which was beyond beautiful. Still, we have a cd we burned labeled "Wedding Music", so anytime I hear these songs I think of them as our wedding songs. Funnily enough, the cd player came magically to life once we were married, so we were able to use the Hawaiian version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow for signing the paperwork, and Is This Love by Bob Marley for walking back up the aisle as man and wife.

CourtneyV I loved my dress too...there are days when all I want to do is put it on and walk around the apartment! I don't, but I am verrry tempted. Yes, we cruised to our location. It was the most cost effective way for our guests to attend. Bermuda is a fairly expensive island, and I could not see asking our family and friends to shell out upwards of $300 a night for our wedding. Plus, we love the cruise ship atmosphere.

Thank you everyone for your comments! I did forget to mention (as the review was getting a bit too long even for my taste!) that if any of you are debating using TWE for planning your wedding, I would use extreme caution. They don't appear to be particularly organized, and maybe that has to do with the sheer volume of weddings they process (in some cases it's two or three weddings per cruise). Make sure you keep all your emails, copies of all paperwork and contract information, and if it's at all possible, maybe even make recordings of your phone calls. The company has been known to go back on their promises, and has caused numerous problems for past brides. There is a forum on Cruise Critic: Cruise reviews, message boards, bargains, cruise information - CruiseCritic.com specific to cruise weddings if you are looking for more informatin. Luckily my wedding turned out just as I hoped, and not a day goes by that I don't stop and think about it. Granted, it's only been a few months, but I have a sneaky suspicion that even after a few years, I'm still going to get all misty eyed when I think about it. :-)

Hello All! I've posted this link at the end of my review as well, but I thought I'd post it here as well for easier access: Facebook | Jennifer Hill Holmes's Photos – Bermuda Wedding Album

I’m going to apologize right now, because this is going to be loooooong. Hopefully, somewhere in my rambling on, there will be some information that can help any future brides. To give a little background, growing up my father was in the military, so we moved around a lot. When I was six we moved from the Northwest Territories in Canada to Bermuda, and even at such a young age, it had a profound effect on me. One memory is still clear in my mind, of a bridal arch left behind on a beach at sunset, tulle and flowers blowing in the wind, and it was then that I decided that one day, I too would be married on a Bermudian beach. Fast forward to June 2005. My fiancé (who proposed on father’s day) knew that I had dreamed of a wedding in Bermuda for two decades, and agreed it would be the perfect place. The biggest obstacle now would be finding an affordable way for our guests to share our day. We looked at different resorts, we looked at rental apartments, but when it came down to it, booking a cruise was the most cost effective way to go. We set our date for May 10, 2007, and as of April 2006 planning got underway. During the search for a cruise for our date, we came across wedding packages through the cruiseline. Both my fiancé and I thought this was great, and would make the planning that much easier. We quickly found out that it wasn’t the cruiseline that planned the weddings, but a company called The Wedding Experience that is used by many of the major cruiselines for planning weddings. Since they were so widely used throughout the world, and planned so many weddings annually, we figured they must be good at what they do. The first few months of the planning went great. Our coordinator at TWE was efficient and friendly, responding to our emails and our questions within hours. Paperwork was quickly processed and fiancé and I were able to sit back and focus on getting our invitations printed and coordinating with our travel agent for the cruise. Then our coordinator left TWE. We quickly got passed on to another coordinator who was just as efficient as the previous, however, none of our previous information had been passed on aside from the date. Our wedding location which had been confirmed was not the same listed on the paperwork our new coordinator was given, and there were quotes we had asked for that had gotten lost in the shuffle. Everything quickly got sorted out and planning was on track again. I became focused on finding a dress and my fiancé started up an Excel spreadsheet for all the wedding costs (he loves Excel…I personally can’t figure it out, but it makes him happy, so that’s all that matters). Our second coordinator then left the company. Now up until this point both of us had been pretty laid back about the whole process. We were getting the quotes we asked for, our emails were being answered, and our dream location (The Coco Reef Resort) was confirmed. Still, after going through two coordinators already, and now being passed off to a third, we were beginning to get a tiny bit concerned. Well, to be honest, my fiancé was getting concerned, I was still confident everything was going to be fine. However, our third coordinator with TWE left much to be desired. The final paperwork due date was coming up, and we had to remind her so that she would be around to receive our fax. Our emails often went a week or more without being answered, sometimes not answered at all. Any phone calls we made were met by a girl who, although incredibly friendly and kind, could never find our file and often told us she’d call us back once she had it in front of her. The phone calls rarely came. Now I’m not saying we were making phone calls every other day, because we weren’t. But about once a month we liked to check in to see how things were coming along, and whether there was any paperwork we had forgotten or if there was something we had yet to pay for. We just wanted to make sure that everything that needed to be done to make sure the wedding was legal and would go forward as planned was done. April 2007 finally arrived, and we were a month away from our wedding. The dress had arrived, all our guests had confirmed and made their final payments on their cruise, our wedding party had their attire, and our flower girl’s dress was completed (my future MIL made it). It was mid-April when we received a phone call from one Barbara Whitecross from the Bermuda Wedding Salon. Ironically, we had spoken with her during the original planning stages of our wedding, before we had decided to go with TWE. Both my fiancé and I were a little confused as to why we were hearing from her, since the last time we had spoken to her had been almost a year before. Well, it turns out that The Wedding Experience, who is outsourced by the cruiselines, works directly with The Wedding Salon in Bermuda. Barbara’s staff would be in charge of our wedding day, and making sure everything went according to plan. My fiancé and I could not have been more relieved than we were at the end of this phone call. TWE promises a phone call two weeks prior to the wedding to go over final confirmations, and to let the bridal couple know who they will be working with the day of the wedding. Barbara, who had been having her own troubles with our contact at TWE, decided to call us herself and get the answers she required to ensure our wedding day went off smoothly. In the twenty minutes we spent on the phone with her, everything we had been struggling to confirm through TWE for the past six months was settled and my fiancé and I could relax. THE WEDDING…..have I bored any of you yet? The trip to Bermuda was wonderful, and we had a full day and a half to enjoy the island before the wedding. But finally, May 10th had arrived, and I was slowly becoming a nervous wreck. I woke up early to disembark and get my hair done. My maid of honour lives in Bermuda, and she and her mother were my hairstylists for the day. My MOH teaches salsa dancing on the island, and does a number of shows for the hotels and abroad throughout the year, so she is used to having to put hairstyles together. Let me say that I loved my hair, and not having to pay an exorbitant price was definitely a plus. I headed back to the ship to get ready, and by this time, I was starting to shake just a bit. It took me very little time to get into my dress. Since I didn’t want my fiancé to see me, his sister (and my bridesmaid) had slept in our cabin with me the night before, so we hung out there until it was time to head down to where the cabs would be meeting us. After all the guests had been picked up, I headed outside with my parents and my bridesmaid, and we were on our way. The Coco Reef Resort is located about half an hour from the where our ship was docked, so we had a beautiful drive through the island. Strangely though, the closer we got, the calmer I became. We finally arrived at the resort, where I was told to wait in the cab until our onsite coordinator, Malika, came to get me. During this time, my fiancé found a way to send me a note that of course made me cry. After waiting for about ten minutes, Malika came to get me, and it was time to start. My MOH, my bridesmaid, and our flower girl were waiting in the lobby of the resort. Malika handed me my bouquet (pink roses and hydrangeas), which until that moment I wasn’t sure what I would be getting. A standard bouquet came with the package through TWE, and when Barbara had called us in April she asked me what colour flowers I would like. I told her pink or blue, and it was left at that. Let me say that I loved my bouquet, it turned out more beautiful than I could have hoped. After handing me my bouquet, and after I made sure my girls had theirs (which I made myself), we headed outside. The sky had been a deep grey all morning, and was still looking very foreboding. But it wasn’t raining, and the contrast of the ocean on the sky was breathtaking. I will admit now that the ceremony itself flew by in a crazy kind of blur. I remember my parents walking me down the aisle, and that the cd player didn’t work for our entrance music. (It wasn’t missed, the sound of the ocean was phenomenal.) I remember how kind our minister was, and looking at my future mother in law only to see a mountain of tissue had magically appeared on her lap. Then somehow, our vows had been said, the rings had been exchanged, and our paperwork was being signed. Malika had finally gotten the cd player to work, and I could hear strains of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love†over the roar of the ocean. We were married. Long ago, my fiancé and I had decided we would do our first dance in the sand immediately following the ceremony. So once we had signed everything that needed to be signed, our guests formed a semi-circle around us as we stepped barefoot onto the sand. Malika started the cd player once more, and as the opening chords of the song More by Harry Connick Jr started to play, we started to dance. Once we finished our twirl in the sand, it was time for our photography. It went by fairly quickly, and in hindsight there were a few more pictures I would have liked to have been taken, but they just did not occur to me in the rush of things, and our photographer was concerned that the sky might open up at any minute and ruin his equipment. But our pictures turned out beautifully, and combined with the seven other cameras we had pointed at us that day, we had more than enough great shots to document the day. Following our photo shoot, we proceeded to a deck by the pool at the resort for cake and champagne. The cake was delicious, just a simple yellow cake with sticky white frosting (I think it was fondant). It was provided by the resort, and I have no complaints whatsoever. Once the cake had been cut and the champagne had been drunk, we were taken back to our ship where we had about an hour to relax before dinner. We weren’t going to have a traditional reception, but we had arranged dinner for our guests at a local restaurant called La Trattoria. It had been my favourite restaurant when I lived on the island, and I wanted to share their amazing food with our family and friends. The restaurant staff went out of their way to make our guests comfortable, and the food, as always, was phenomenal. It was the perfect cap to our perfect day. Our wedding went just as we had hoped. It was small and intimate, and we couldn’t have asked for better people to help us out in making our day go smoothly. The Wedding Experience wasn’t the easiest company to deal with, and if I had to do it over I would have spent the extra money to work directly with The Bermuda Wedding Salon. But in the end, I had the perfect wedding, and I was married to the perfect guy, and you can’t get much better than that. Here is a link to a photoalbum I have set up: Facebook | Jennifer Hill Holmes's Photos – Bermuda Wedding Album

We went to Disney for our honeymoon just this past May. In case the concierge isn't aware when you check in, let them know you're honeymooners. They have these really cute "Just Married" pins that you can wear around the parks, or, they just make really great souvenirs. We had a lot of people congratulating us, while some of the ride operators would tease us and say "so that's why the line is taking so long, honeymooners holding things up!" It was a lot of fun. In case no one mentions it to you, be sure you get your phone call from Mickey and Minnie. Someone who works for the park will know what you mean. :-) I'm not sure if I need to tell you this since you've been there before, but if you're coffee drinkers and enjoy good coffee (or tea for that matter), look around for the small coffee vendors that don't accept room cards as payment. They were the only places we could find a decent caffeine fix. I know there's one just inside the gates at Animal Kingdom, and one or two scattered around Epcot. They're probably elsewhere too, but I just didn't notice them. Not sure about the timing of your honeymoon, but if either of you are Star Wars fans, MGM does Star Wars weekends every year, sometimes starting mid-May and going until Mid-June, and sometimes starting June and going for the entire month. I missed out by two weeks when we were there (yes, I'm a die hard fan, and the hubby still loves me!). They put on a special parade and have different stars from the movies make appearences. Hope you guys have a blast! We're already planning a trip back!

no big plans, just some people over for games and pizza!

Thank you for the birthday wishes!

Hi Kelly! it's been about a month since someone last posted to this thread, but I'm hoping you're still keeping an eye on it. I had my honeymoon at Disneyworld in May, and had the best time of my life. I had never been before, so for eight days I got the chance to be 5 years old all over again. We stayed at the Port Orleans French Quarter Resort, and absolutely loved it. The grounds are beautiful, the staff is friendly and helpful, and best of all, it's right on the edge of a man-made river. Our room looked out over the water, and was only a minute's walk from the riverboat dock. I think what we liked most about the resort was how it was the perfect escape from the craziness that is Disneyworld. Don't get me wrong, I loved the craziness, it's why we went in the first place. But at the end of an eight hour day in the sun with so much activity, it was great to get away from the parks to a place that seemed completely removed from the rest of the property. Hope you have as great a time as we did! With Disney, you really can't go wrong no matter where you stay.

oh don't worry, there will be pictures! But I'm at work right now (shhh!!!), so don't have access to them! lizz10179, beachbride, and TammyB, Thank you for your kind wishes! I'll get a review up by the end of next week, at the latest!

Hello! My name is Jenn, and although I've already had my wedding, I still can't seem to get enough of perusing the internet for island wedding sites. I think I'm a junkie! But if I can somehow help out some future bride, it will make my obsession worth it. My wedding too place on May 10, 2007, on the island of Bermuda, and was a wonderful day. Congratulations to all you future brides out there! Don't let the stress get to you, it will all work out in the end!