Carl and Haley marred in Tekapo this year. A love of camping and the high country meant this was the place to be on their wedding day. They share there wonderful day with the ODT.
Carl and I meet in 2006. He was out celebrating his 30th birthday and I was out with my sister for her birthday. I saw him and well that's the beginning although it took us a few months time to start seeing each other. Turned out Carl and my sister share the same birthday and his cousin is really good friends with my sister so how we didn't meet before then I don't know.
We didn't have a romantic proposal but if he did get all mooshy I probably would have fallen over. Carl got me a beautiful ring and told me he would put it on my finger but he wouldn't get on one knee.
We got married in Tekapo on the 25th Feb 2012. Neither of us wanted to get married in Dunedin as we wanted to have a small intimate wedding and wanted our guests to have a really nice weekend away as well. We went with Tekapo as we normally go camping down the road at Pukaki so have had many good times up there with our friends and family and we love the high country.
As soon as we got engaged I ran out and brought a bride and groom magazine, as you do, and whilst we were up camping I sat down with my sister and we starting looking at them, when I opened the magazine there was an advertisement for the label Ella and I knew I had just seen my dress. When I went to House of Kavina I tried on many dresses but kept going back to the one from the magazine. I loved it and even trying it on a couple of sizes to big and having to use my imagination I knew it was perfect.
My bridesmaid dresses were also from The House of Kavina. I had seen them online and knew they would be perfect and even though they didn't carry that label anymore they ordered them in for me.
My flowers were from Carley Jones. I told her what I liked and left the rest up to her, she also did all our vases on our tables. I didn't look at my flowers until the day and was blown away at how perfect they were.
Peppers Bluewater Resort did all of our catering for us.
Our photographer was Snap Photography from Christchurch. We never had the chance to meet them before the wedding but Anna was incredible and it was like we had known her forever and the photos were just amazing, We were so lucky.
The highlight for us, especially me, was organising everything from here and taking it all to Tekapo and doing most of it myself and everything was easy and stress free. The other highlight was having all our friends and family make the effort to come up to spend our day with us, it was truly humbling and really heart warming. Also when our kids, nieces and nephew sung a song for us, it was so beautiful and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
