Love is in the air (and across the pond)

Experiencing the city of love for the first time—on my wedding day

Most people visit their wedding venue well before booking it. I, on the other hand, arrived at mine for the first time on the day I’d become a wife—wedding dress and all.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, what better time to tell you the story of how I planned a wedding in a city I’d never been to before? Of course, it’s a love story, but not the kind you might expect. It’s about the love we develop with the places we travel to, the personal meaning we assign to them, and the memories that define destinations we always want to return to.

Seattle, for example, will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first city I traveled to with my now-husband, Dylan. For my birthday, he surprised me with a trip there to see the factory where Boeing assembles their airplanes (the surest way to win my heart, at the time). I’ll never forget sinking into the plush hotel bed, overcome with emotion that someone loved me enough to plan all of this.

There are plenty of destinations—hotels, restaurants, entire cities—that become meaningful to us because of who we experience them with. The moments become memories we can revisit, sometimes only in our minds. But how special is it when we can return to an actual place?

Before I got married, I knew how important the memories of my wedding day would be. So when it came time to plan it, I decided to do something unconventional: I planned it in another country, in a city I’d long admired but had not yet actually been to.