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Since the pandemic hit, more couples are opting to travel the world for a once-in-a-lifetime elopement in a faraway destination. After falling in love with the idea of tying the knot in the land of fire and ice, Ariel and Vic tied the knot in an intimate Iceland seaside elopement. Oh, and did we mention they flew over 18 hours from Hong Kong to get there?!
Their special day was complete with a ceremony with waterfall views–a location that they picked the day of the wedding–zoom calls with family members, and moody portraits taken by Junebug photographer Sunday & White on the foggy coastline. So if you’re considering ditching the idea of a big wedding idea and eloping in your dream city or country, you’re going to want to see this. Just have those passports ready because you’re going to want to book those flights.
The Couple:
Ariel and Vic
The Wedding:
Kvernufoss, Vik, Iceland
A Memorable Drive On The Morning Of The Iceland Seaside Elopement
The most memorable part of the day was driving two hours back and forth from our hotel to the District Commissioners Office to submit the hard copies of our marriage documents. This happened on the morning of our wedding! It was an extremely tight schedule, and my partner and I were rushing a lot during the few hours before our ceremony. Strangely enough, it was also very exciting, and I am so glad that I had her by my side and we managed this together. We also only decided on the location of the ceremony a few hours beforehand. My partner and I drove there in the morning to scope out the location as we had never visited it before. And when we saw it, we just knew this was the place. That was a very special moment for us.
Tying The Knot During A Pandemic
Getting married during COVID is a truly challenging but also very memorable time. We tried to prepare as much as we could but also embraced the idea of the process being quite unpredictable. There was constantly an element of “winging it,” especially during the pandemic, in addition to Iceland being well known for having very unpredictable weather. We only decided on our wedding location on the day of our wedding!
Exploring Iceland After A Long Trip
I am so proud that my partner and I managed to plan our trip and get married during the pandemic. We flew all the way from Hong Kong to Iceland, which is a country neither of us had visited before. We got married in front of a waterfall, then went on our honeymoon touring the rest of Iceland for two weeks. It was short but sweet, and we had some hiccups along the way, but at the end of the day, it’s being able to overcome the little obstacles that make the whole process so memorable.
Congratulations Ariel and Vic, on their Iceland seaside elopement! We’re so thankful that Junebug photographer Sunday & White was there to capture the intimate moments of their special day. See more of their work in our collection of wedding professionals from around the world.
If you’ve found yourself planning a wedding in the midst of the pandemic, you know how stressful it can be to bounce back and forth between guest lists and restrictions in your area—all while keeping your guests’ safety and your celebration in mind. With the help of their wedding planner, Katie and Carson managed to pull their outdoor Vermont wedding together with a gorgeous moody style.
The scenic and naturally beautiful venue is owned by the family so it was an easy solution that provided the perfect foliage to compliment their incredible decor and florals.
Don’t get us started on the vibes brought into their outdoor reception tent or we’ll never shut up about the perfect balance of elegant boho and stylish industrial chic. Keep scrolling for the images captured by Peach Plum Pear Photo to see what we mean!
The Couple:
Katie and Carson
The Wedding:
Leicester, Vermont, United States
How They Choose Their Outdoor Vermont Wedding Venue
I grew up going up to Vermont in the winters to ski and knew that I loved that area during the chillier months. My family owns a property that was originally a Catholic boy’s camp in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The property is everything you could imagine for a wedding venue—scenic and naturally beautiful, enchanting, and the perfect size for our guest count. We also thought it would be a great place to host guests during the pandemic, and that people would feel safe with the Vermont COVID restrictions and the ample outdoor space.
Proud of their Wedding
I’m so proud of creating the wedding of my dreams even during these crazy times. Looking back, we wouldn’t change a thing—even if times were different. Carson and I knew that the process would be challenging. We knew that we’d have to make adjustments and sacrifices for the health and safety of all of our guests. Our wedding was spectacular because we were able to focus on making each element a beautiful reflection of us. Ultimately, our lower guest count and intimate setting helped us achieve exactly what we envisioned.
Beautifully Memorable Moments With Katie’s Son
Aside from exchanging our own personal vows, the most memorable and beautiful moment was Katie’s preteen son, Cole, and her brother playing guitar and bass for the guests before and during the wedding ceremony. Carson and I wanted Cole to be involved and to feel like this was a special day for us and him as well. Cole and Ben practiced for weeks leading up to the wedding and learned three songs that we requested for them to play at the ceremony. They did a beautiful job playing “Ocean Eyes” by Billie Eilish, “Everybody” by Mac Miller, and “D’yer Mak’er” by Led Zeppelin. Cole also stood with Carson during the ceremony and presented him with the rings. It was so special to have him be such a big part of our day.
Wedding Planning Advice
The most important piece of advice we can share is to find a wedding planner and event designer that you know and like. Then put your trust in them. Let them lead you in the right direction, sit back, and enjoy the process. You’ll never be able to control it all so accept that and be fluid in terms of what could come up and what could change.
Congratulations to Katie and Carson on their gorgeous and intentional outdoor Vermont wedding! Special thanks to Peach Plum Pear Photo for sharing their day with us. If you’re feeling inspired to curate your own intentional day in your property, get started with our backyard wedding guide that will walk you through everything you need to know—and some tips to set your nuptials apart.
Luscious greenery, DIY bouquets and boutonnieres, and a quaint backyard reception—we can’t think of a better COVID-conscious wedding than Stephanie and Stephen’s. Although it wasn’t their first choice of venue, this smaller celebration proved that shifting your original plans can be done beautifully. And with a backyard as luscious as this one, we don’t blame them for opting for this venue.
Not only were they utilizing an incredible venue, but this DIY couple literally made their own wedding dreams come true. From creating individual charcuterie boards to having a custom beer brewed, every detail of this wedding was unique and thoughtful. Stephen and Stephanie truly made their wedding day their own and had fun along the way. Thankfully, J.Olson Weddings captured every laugh and every detail of this COVID-conscious wedding. Get ready to see nature working its magic and get your Pinterest ready.
The Couple:
Stephanie and Stephen
The Wedding:
Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA
Have Fun And Savor Important Details
You can have fun no matter where you are if you’re with your person! We feared the pandemic conditions would make our wedding less special and less fun, so we spent a lot of time on a few key details that were really important to both of us. We really wanted to have some of our best people around us, take photos by the Mississippi River, and have really great food for our guests. It made it easy to let go of the big wild ideas that weren’t as important, and we were able to have fun and savor those most important details.
Choosing A COVID-Conscious Wedding
Pre-pandemic, we’d picked a nearby wooded park with a lodge that had a great way of showcasing nature with some hiking trails and a small lake nearby. When we shelved our ‘big party’ and our venue along with it, some generous family members who live down the street from us offered up their backyard, and it seemed perfect! They have a gorgeous flower and vegetable garden, which provided a comfortable and COVID-safe way to still enjoy a little nature in our day without the stress of navigating the logistics of a typical venue. The proximity to our homemade it really easy to shuffle décor and food back and forth as well! And of course, living in Minnesota, the weather is not always cooperative, and we were lucky to have the foresight to rent a tent so we could escape the rain while enjoying our garden party celebration
Pre-Toast Mad-Libs
A friend gave us a goofy idea to have wedding mad-lib letters to the couple for guests to fill out since social distancing was bumming us out. We were skeptical, but went with it, and made a copy for each guest and invited them to read their mad-libs aloud before official toasts. We were in stitches laughing at the silly things our family and friends came up with, and it warmed up the crowd for the best lady and dude of honor speeches from our siblings.
DIY Florals And Charcuterie Boards
There were a lot of DIYs that made our wedding magical—honestly, they were some of the best parts! We selected our own flowers from a floral market and picked some wild sweet fern to hand-tie our own bouquets and boutonnieres, in addition to table arrangements. We found a great Esty shop—Leaf Décor—that makes forest-themed art that we used for table escort cards along with some leaf clippings from local trees that Stephen’s dad snipped the day before our wedding. Plus, we asked around for family members to collect enough wooden cutting boards to make individual charcuterie boards, which were assembled with top-notch wild venison salami.
Handmade Cakes And Custom Brews
A close friend bakes cakes on the side. So, we asked her to create a custom wedding cake with our favorite flavors—lemon, blueberry, and rosemary. It was gorgeous and delicious. We also had a family member who brews beer make a custom brew for our wedding. It was a Maple Marzen called “The Perfect PH”, which was made with maple syrup we harvested and produced on some family property.
Congratulations to Stephanie and Stephen on their perfectly green COVID-conscious wedding. Major shoutout to J.Olson Weddings for capturing and sharing the excitement of this day with us. Loving the idea of a backyard wedding or reception? Check out our ultimate guide to planning a backyard wedding.
We featured Caroline & Simen’s Star Wars proposalin 2019… now you get to see their wedding and hear about the ways COVID actually made this autistic bride’s life easier!
Our offbeat wedding at a glance: We’re both goths, and my favorite color (besides black) is purple, so I guess that was our theme. We just went with whatever we wanted, and everything else we threw out the window. The pandemic did of course affect our wedding a lot, dwindling the guest list down from 80 to 35 people. We had to have restrictions, but it was still wonderful. I can’t imagine it any other way. We got married with family and friends there, had a cemetery photoshoot, a bunch of fun details, great music, and a lot of laughs. What more can you ask for? Oh yes, nobody got sick! SUCCESS.
As an autistic bride, I feel like I need to have control over everything and plan out every single thing I do — that’s just how I live my life. So it was the same for wedding planning too! I probably read most of Offbeat Bride’s archive (I LOVE to do research, we autistics can really get obsessed with our special interests), and the Offbeat Bride timeline checklist was a LIFESAVER. I just picked out the things we wanted and wrote them down in a notebook.
I was a little nervous about having planned for 80 guests, and just in general about the day stressing me out so much that I would be exhausted for a week afterwards. But since COVID caused the guestlist to dwindle to 35 people, it made it much more manageable, so I can’t imagine how it would have been with 80!
Thanks to my smaller guestlist thanks to COVID, I also didn’t have to hug people, shake hands, or mingle a ton, which was greatfor me. I don’t really understand or like these social norms, and I hate small talk. The pandemic has been nice to us autistic brides that way!
Tell us about the ceremony: We did your typical courthouse style wedding — cause it was free (haha). Since half my family is Filipino, they couldn’t have made it to Norway pandemic or not, and since almost 50 people couldn’t make it because of the pandemic, we live-streamed the ceremony.
We were only allowed to be 10 people total in there. My sister used my phone to stream it on Facebook, and I even had some family standing outside watching! Plus friends around the world, of course. We still haven’t watched it back, but I think it’s gonna be nice to look back on.
We totally stole the show with our extravagant looks, we got so many compliments from people connected to the weddings before and after us, and the people inside the courthouse themselves!
I’ve never really understood why people think a courthouse wedding isn’t worth dressing up for. It’s still your wedding day!
Also, there are SO many wedding traditions that me as an autistic bride just react with “why” to and feel no obligation to follow. We question and see right through those things everybody does “just because that’s the way it’s done”. Which is why in local wedding groups when people ask “do I HAVE to do X?” I advocate for doing whatever the hell you want! It’s your wedding, you decide what is right for you.
Tell us about the reception: Originally I didn’t really want a set seating chart, maybe just group certain people, and after dinner they could mingle. Buut the pandemic changed that. We got hit with the second wave the month before, and luckily there was a dip in numbers around our wedding, so we decided to go ahead with the party.
We had a sweetheart table, and seven tables with about five people at each. Families got their own tables, and friends who would see each other otherwise got to sit together, but some had to sit about a meter apart. We bought SO many bottles of hand sanitizer that we put EVERYWHERE. In our invitation, we asked people not to hug and shake hands, and keep to other restrictions we had at the time.
We had a friend as toastmaster, who did a wonderful job.
For dinner we had a taco buffet, which everybody loved.
Our cake and cupcakes matched our theme of course, and I got the topper custom-made.
Cutting the cake was much more complicated affair than I imagined! I’m so glad my sister filmed it so we can laugh again and again at the clunky logistics of it.
We are all for gender role reversal, equality and feminism, so we took some hilarious photos! We also took each other’s surnames. His family’s surname is actually his mother’s, which I think is pretty cool.
What was the most important lesson you learned from your wedding? People told me that your wedding day will never be just like you planned it to be. It definitely wasn’t. A global pandemic and other factors left us with a huge drop in guests, it rained, and yeah. It was still a wonderful day.
I was surprised at how chill I was, I didn’t feel any stress at all, even though everyone around me did!
I only have two regrets, really:
Time went by so fast that I felt I didn’t take enough time to talk to every person (can you imagine if there were 80 guests?!)
The playlist I had made wasn’t put on until after dessert. So I will share it with you! It’s 100 songs and about 8 hours long, and features mostly goth, post-punk etc., but also metal, electronic and pop. Mostly love themed! The entire party cheer-pressured Simen into dancing with me, so we danced to “Love My Way” by The Psychedelic Furs. A pretty fitting song! It was just as awkward as first dances tend to be. It was mostly Simen taking super long steps and me trying to follow with my stubby legs. After a minute he stopped and said “Happy?” and I went “No wait! Dip me!” and made a dramatic pose. He did, and everyone cheered.
Bride’s dress: I purchased the dress from a Chinese dressmaker who I later learned had unscrupulous business practices, so I can’t recommend them even though the dress was lovely.
Like most other couples of 2020, Daniella and Nelson had a small family wedding planned in the Dominican Republic before a pandemic changed the wedding world as we know it. But rather than let that stop them from tying the knot, the couple moved their ceremony to the Consulate of the Dominican Republic in Boston. After saying “I do” in the courthouse, the newlyweds went to lunch, cheered to their future with champagne and cake, and throughout the process took some stunning photos around the city with photographer Scarlet Roots.
Although their special day was small, every detail was well-thought-out–especially their fashion. Daniella looked beautifully casual in her Staud short wedding dress, Jennifer Behr birdcage headband, and Refine chunky headband–all of which accentuated her colorful bouquet from Central Square Florist. Meanwhile, Nelson opted for a more traditional look in a linen guayabera, a button-up shirt typically worn in the Dominican Republic. Who says courthouse wedding fashion has to be boring?
It was important for us to keep in mind the true end goal–our marriage and life together and not necessarily the day. Since everything came together very quickly, we didn’t have much time to plan. To keep things as safe as possible, we had our ceremony with two witnesses, snapped some pictures, and then went to lunch together. Back home, we called our families and shared some cake and champagne.
Shop similar headbands:
Laidback Vibes At The Romantic Courthouse Wedding
We decided to elope after COVID-19 complicated our plans for a small family wedding at home in the Dominican Republic. It was important for us to have a relaxed and fun day, so we kept everything laid back. My look was an easy linen dress from Staudwith block heels. I couldn’t decide between the Refine satin headband or the Jennifer Behr veil, so I wore both. Nelson wore a linen chacabana or guayabera that’s traditional in our country. I ordered my bouquet from our local florist the day before.
Congratulations again to Daniella and Nelson on their romantic courthouse wedding. We’re so thankful Scarlet Roots was there to capture the love of the day! If you’re planning your own courthouse “I do’s,” be sure to check out these courthouse wedding dresses that are simple yet special.
We had a sweetheart table, and seven tables with about five people at each. Families got their own tables, and friends who would see each other otherwise got to sit together, but some had to sit about a meter apart. We bought SO many bottles of hand sanitizer that we put EVERYWHERE. In our invitation, we asked people not to hug and shake hands, and keep to other restrictions we had at the time.
