So I'm terrible and have meant to post these for a few weeks now. I know a lot of ladies on here that are FB friends with me have seen them, so for those of you that aren't, here you are! Enjoy!
Quick recap of the day...
We hadn't seen the venue before, since we live in Vancouver and it is out in Yoho National Park. We visited it two days before our wedding, actually when another wedding was happening, and it was a beautiful blue-skies day. We were in love with it and so excited! The morning of our wedding we went to have breakfast together...and it was raining. POURING RAIN. I was trying to keep up the good attitude that I told myself I would have, but I'm not going to lie, I was pretty upset. We were also both big bundles of nerves, which I didn't think would happen for me. The indoor location we had booked was great, but the outdoor one was AMAZING. We went back to our room, the hair/make-up artist arrived from her long drive into our secluded venue, and H went off to get ready in one of his brother's rooms.
Well, nature is my friend I guess, because after pouring all night and all morning about 2 hours before the ceremony the rain started to lighten up. By an hour before, it was still really cloudy but no rain and we got the ok from the venue to have the ceremony outside. Yes! A couple of the guys ran in to tell me to come outside to see that the sky was starting to look a bit blue, and even BIL called from another room to tell me that it was looking good. I was more excited than I can ever express in words. We were *this close* to having the ceremony inside and just barely missing the rain. Even our photographer/officiant/every person there was insisting we wait if 2 pm hit and it looked like it might clear. I insisted that I wouldn't make everyone wait around like that, so I'm really glad the rain stopped when it did!
The ceremony was short and sweet. DH had insisted he wouldn't cry when he saw me, but he did. Sweet victory for me
I can barely remember everything as it went by so damn fast. We had a lot of tourists interested in some of our photos, especially the ones of us canoeing and then down by the waterfall later. I didn't even notice a few people watching the ceremony, and I'm really glad I didn't as it would have bugged me to know that we had strangers just standing there watching. After the group pictures (which I didn't really include here) we went down to the canoe rental shop and paid for an hours rental for anyone that wanted to go out with us. Our photographer got some amazing pictures of our bridal party individually out there too (which again, I didn't include). We did a quick canoe ourselves and headed off to take photos by ourselves and left everyone to canoe or enjoy a beverage while we were gone. We go hiking a lot so we put on our hiking boots for a bit down near the waterfall, also because I wanted to be in more stable footwear since it was raining a few hours before. We didn't have a traditional reception, just took our guests out to dinner so we only had our photographer until just before then.
(We got a huge laugh out of one of our first kiss pictures, the one I shared. It looks like I'm grabbing him and pulling him in!)