{"id":4117,"date":"2012-09-03T06:00:36","date_gmt":"2012-09-03T11:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/?p=4117"},"modified":"2012-09-15T15:21:57","modified_gmt":"2012-09-15T20:21:57","slug":"the-next-best-thing-to-eloping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/the-next-best-thing-to-eloping\/","title":{"rendered":"The Next Best Thing To Eloping"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post from one of our favorite travelers and unique brides, Meg Rulli with Landing Standing<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Miami<\/p>\n

Many girls dream of their big lavish wedding from the tender age of six. By the time they are ready\u00a0to walk down the aisle decades later, they have had their perfect wedding dress, cake, and floral\u00a0arrangements picked out way in advance.<\/p>\n

I was not one of these girls.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sure, I had visions of how I wanted my dream wedding to play out. But none of these visions involved a\u00a0wedding dress, a cake, or floral arrangements. Okay, well maybe the dress was factored in there a little\u00a0bit\u2026 After all, I was not a nudist bride in my childhood fantasies.<\/p>\n

But even when I was a little girl, I envisioned getting married on a white sand beach somewhere exotic\u00a0(like stereotypical Bora Bora) with my mythical fianc\u00e9 by my side\u2026 And only my fianc\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Yes, I always wanted to elope.<\/em><\/p>\n

My parents knew this about me and probably saw it as a huge godsend for their future checkbooks. But\u00a0shortly after Tony and I got engaged, I mentioned the word \u201celope\u201d to my mom and I saw her eyes glaze\u00a0over with those classic mom guilt tears.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean I won\u2019t get to see my own daughter in her wedding dress?\u201d<\/p>\n

Okay mom, you win.<\/p>\n

After that discovery, Tony and I went back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n

We started brainstorming a wedding on the complete opposite spectrum of an eloped marriage:<\/p>\n

One blowout bash with all of our friends and family.<\/p>\n

Which is what, probably like 50-100 people tops?<\/p>\n

WRONG.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once we started adding up all our friends that we wanted to invite along with their significant others\u00a0(and some not-so-significant \u201cfriends with benefits\u201d) and our long lost aunts and 3 rd cousins, our\u00a0proposed guest list began spiraling out of control.<\/p>\n

50-100 guests? \u00a0Try more like 250.<\/p>\n

The thought of this scared the crap out of me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Despite my burning desire for a two-person wedding, I also am a huge mess when I am in the spotlight.\u00a0Put me in front of a group of people where all eyes are on me, and my clumsiness, claustrophobia, and\u00a0ability to talk like the Rainman increase exponentially.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a pretty sight.<\/p>\n

Long story short, the blowout wedding was out of the question.<\/p>\n

So then Tony and I tried scaling the guest list down to 50 people. In order to do this, we had to make\u00a0some SERIOUS and harsh cuts to the guest list. Tony and I felt like catty teenage girls when trying to\u00a0figure out whom of our friends and family was truly important enough to make the elite cut. The whole
\nprocess was unsettling.<\/p>\n

My sister pulled off a beautiful 50 person intimate wedding (which was probably the most fun wedding\u00a0I have ever attended), and I applaud her for going through with the ruthless wedding list cuts. But what\u00a0can I say\u2026 I just wasn\u2019t that ballsy of a bride.<\/p>\n

\"Catamaran<\/p>\n

After weeks of debate over the costs and stress of a traditional wedding, we decided to stick with the\u00a0original elopement dream, while appeasing to our immediate family (i.e. our moms).<\/p>\n

With our new plan in place, we cut the list all together and just had our own blowout wedding of just 7\u00a0guests: Both sets of parents, our two siblings, and my brother-in-law<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now you might be rolling your eyes in boredom just thinking of how lame this wedding was, but if you\u00a0know anything about the Rulli and Batley clans, you know that we like to party\u2026 And we don\u2019t need a\u00a0big group of people to get into the festive spirit.<\/p>\n

At the time, Tony and I were living in beautiful Miami, and while it wasn\u2019t dreamy Bora Bora, it was still\u00a0considered a lovely destination for a small, intimate destination wedding. So we gathered the families\u00a0down in South Beach for the weekend, rented a private catamaran to sail us around Biscayne Bay for a\u00a0sunset ceremony, and rented out a private wine attic in downtown Miami for a scrumptious five-course\u00a0wine pairing reception dinner.<\/p>\n

With the captain of the boat, the officiant, and photographer added to the mix, there were only 12 of us\u00a0on board the boat for our wedding. It was a small enough gathering, that I felt the intimacy of a private\u00a0elopement, while still having my closest loved ones there to witness our big day.<\/p>\n

It was the perfect compromise to my childhood dreams.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Apart from our wedding being incredibly personal, we were also able to get really creative with how\u00a0we wanted our big day to play out. Between the private wine tasting dinner, the wedding playlist we\u00a0created on our iPod to play on the catamaran\u2019s sound system, and the homemade flower bouquets &\u00a0cheese plates for snacking on-board, we were able to have complete control over our ideal wedding\u00a0scenario.<\/p>\n

As an even bigger bonus, by having a small and intimate wedding, we were able to save TENS OF\u00a0THOUSANDS of dollars that we instead put towards our dream of travelling the world for an entire year\u00a0(in addition to our baller honeymoon).<\/p>\n

As I am writing this post, I am all smiles just thinking about how wonderful our wedding day was\u2026 And\u00a0as I write this, I am also relishing in the fact that I am now in Thailand travelling the world with my\u00a0husband off of our wedding fund.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Your turn: Did you ever dream about your perfect wedding as a kid? What is your idea of the perfect<\/em>\u00a0day?<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Author, Meg Rulli and her husband Tony\u00a0left their jobs in January 2012 to go RTW and try out this whole location independent thing. They are aspiring entrepreneurs & digital nomads that blog about travel, food, and anything ridiculous at Landing Standing<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post from one of our favorite travelers and unique brides, Meg Rulli with Landing Standing. Many girls dream of their big lavish wedding from the tender age of six. By the time they are ready\u00a0to walk down the aisle … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,5,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-honeymoon","category-wedding-inspiration","category-wedding-reception"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4117"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4571,"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4117\/revisions\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bubblybride.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}