Honeymoon Travels – Venice

I just realized yesterday that we’ve been back from our honeymoon for more than a month and I’m STILL going through my honeymoon blog posts. Since I only post once a week and have been trying to alternate my travel posts with beauty posts, it means I haven’t finished with anything honeymoon-related yet. Hopefully I can get the last one up next week, but in the meantime, today’s blog is our penultimate stop on our honeymoon: Venice.

Venice has always been on my bucket list, but at the same time, I went in with low expectations. A few of our friends who have travelled to Venice said they didn’t really enjoy it, so we weren’t sure what to expect. Based on advice we received, we only stayed in Venice for a day. We left Sorrento in the morning to return to Naples, and from there we flew in to Venice’s Marco Polo Airport, arriving at 5pm.

The view of Venice from the airplane. It’s connected to Mestre by a large highway!

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Honeymoon Diaries: Paris

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you’ll know that I was in Europe for two weeks for our honeymoon. There were so many cities within Europe we wanted to visit, but with only two weeks available, we settled on Paris, the Amalfi Coast, Venice, and Rome. Today’s post is on our stay in Paris! This was the only city on our itinerary that I’ve already been to. I visited Paris on a school trip when I was 18 and fell in love with the city; even as a kid, I’ve always loved anything Paris-themed. Not entirely sure why, but I think it’s due to my obsession of the show Madeline as a kid. Either way, I’ve always wanted to go back with my husband (who has never been), and what better time to go to the City of Love with him than during our honeymoon? It wasn’t hard to convince him, since Paris was on his bucket list.

Paris is separated into Arrondissements, or districts. For example, the Arc de Triomphe is located in the 8th arrondissement, the Eiffel Tower is located in the 7th, and the Louvre is located in the 1st . We stayed at the Grand Hotel Saint-Michel, which is located in the 5th Arrondissement. The location of the hotel was so convenient – we were a 5 minute walk to the Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Garden) and the Pantheon, a 10 minute walk to the closest Metro station, and a 15 minute walk to the Notre Dame Cathedral. The hotel itself was quite good, too. It was on a quiet street far away from any noise, and although it was a bit small and we didn’t have much of a view, it was clean and modern. Being the beauty lover that I am, I found it interesting that the hair and body products they provided for guests were from Hermès! How fancy.

We stayed in Paris for four full days. There’s a lot to see in the city, so we knew we’d be on a bit of a time crunch! After landing at 9:00 am, we took the Metro to our hotel, where we checked in and dropped off our luggage. 

Wedding Update #3

Today is an update on our wedding planning. According to the count on our wedding website, we are 87 days out! Today’s post covers what we’ve done for invitations, bridesmaids and groomsmen outfits, my shoes, hair, and favours. This might be the second last, if not last, wedding update, because other than a DIY post or two, we’ve covered all of the big items!

Bridesmaid dresses:

I asked the girls to pay for their own dresses, so I wanted to keep costs as low as possible. My vision was for them to wear dusty blue dresses, but I couldn’t find any styles in this shade unless they were $300+. I ended up ordering online from a website called Light in the Box for only $87 each. Ordering dresses online can be a little more than sketchy, especially when you’re ordering from a Chinese website like this one, but my MOH ordered her bridesmaid dresses from the same website when she got married, and the quality was great, so I felt pretty confident that these would turn out well. They arrived in three weeks, and look exactly like they do in the pictures!

Wedding Planning Series: DIY Glitter Table Numbers

Today’s post is on a wedding DIY project that I’ve been working on for the past few months – DIY glitter table numbers. They actually don’t take very much time; I made 15 of them and would say they can be finished in 3-4 days. I just kept abandoning the project and going back to it!

We thought about doing watercolour table numbers, but ultimately decided to do these glitter table numbers instead. These sell for around $15-$20 each on Etsy – which means I would’ve had to spend around $300 on table numbers. I’m not a particularly crafty person, but knew I could spend only a fraction of that if I made them myself.

This is a fairly self-explanatory DIY. You can pretty much tell how it’s made just by looking at it! Spread glue, glitter, repeat. However, in this post, I hope to offer a few tips and tricks I picked up while making these.

Wedding Planning: Update #2

Today’s post is Update #2 on our wedding planning, and focuses on entertainment and décor. This has probably been the most fun part to plan!

Okay, let me start off by saying that there is a lot of “I want this, I decided this”, in this post, which makes it seem like I don’t let my fiancé have any input. That is a false impression! I honestly do ask his opinion, to which his response is always “I’m fine with whatever you want”, which is mostly exactly what I want to hear except when I can’t decide between two things. Like many men, I think he’s honestly perfectly fine just showing up on the day to get hitched.

This meme is actually hilarious, because I’ve done it twice so far! My married female friends say they did the same thing when they planned their wedding, so I don’t feel quite so bad.

Wedding Planning Series: Update #1

Today’s post is an update on our wedding planning. I finally got to sit down and gather my thoughts on the planning process, as this whole time has just been “go, go, go!”

Wedding planning has been pretty smooth sailing so far. One of the biggest struggles was when I started planning, and realized my “dream wedding” is maybe $30K out of our budget. However, once I gave myself a reality check, everything we’ve booked so far has been below budget without having compromise on much.

We booked most of our major vendors by the end of August, because my “just get it done” personality needed everything crossed off my checklist ASAP. Today’s post focuses on the first few vendors we booked. We wanted to find people whose prices were fair, but still fairly well-established in the wedding industry, and our top 3 priorities were food, photography, and music.

Engagement Shoot Makeup Look

I have mostly either been doing makeup posts or wedding posts, but today’s post is both of these topics combined! We just had our engagement shoot this past Sunday. Since we got engaged by the water, we wanted to reflect that and decided to do the shoot at a lake in the Rocky Mountains.

A few months ago, our wedding photographer asked us if we were okay doing the shoot at 6 in the morning on a Sunday, since apparently the period shortly after sunrise or before sunset is considered “golden hour” for photography. Without thinking, we said, “Yeah, sure, whatever makes the photos look the most flattering!” We are both morning people, but when it actually came down to it the morning of, it was a little tough. Since we had to be at the lake by 6 am and the drive out there is roughly an hour and a half, I couldn’t get my hair and makeup done that morning since no one would be available to do for me at 3:00am (lol). With hair, I needed serious help as I am completely useless with doing my own hair. I got my hair done Saturday afternoon and basically tried to not sleep on it that night.