May 2014 - Siegel Thurston Photography

One year ago today we dragged eight of our closest friends and family up into the Scottish hills and pledged our love for one another forever in front of a man wearing a kilt. We get asked a lot which one of us is Scottish, and the answer is really neither. We wanted our wedding to be something special and unique to us. We were looking at a number of places in Europe to say our I Do’s but the green countryside, rainy weather and crumbling castles of Scotland stole our hearts. Your thinking did I just read rainy weather? Yes we are major fans of rain, fog and incredibly puffy clouds. Like the sometimes last minute people that we can be, we planned our destination wedding in 8 short weeks. We found all of our vendors online, because lets face it you can’t taste cake or get a make up trial from an entire continent away. But the internet is an incredible tool and we found some absolutely amazing vendors.

Our flights were a joke. Two planes broke down before they could take off, we were re-routed to airports we weren’t supposed to be at, missed an international flight, got put up in a hotel in Chicago and eventually had to drop the “we are on our way to get married” card so that a nice man at the help counter would put us on a plane to Glasgow. Our original destination airport was Edinburgh so we picked up a one way rental car in Glasgow and drove ourselves to the Edinburgh airport to pick up our scheduled rental car and our friends that had been waiting for us for over 2 hours. As you may have figured by now, our luggage got very very lost. But don’t fret we were smart enough to pack our wedding attire in our carry on bag.

Well Scotland was incredible. We rented a flat in Edinburgh with our friends and lived the local life for a few days. We walked to pubs and found small eateries in the neighborhood. During the day we adventured out into the lush countryside where most of our time was spent taking pictures of sheep and exploring old castles.

Choosing the location for our ceremony came down to one thing, a car. Brett had found this vintage 1960’s Austin Healey 3000 two seater convertible that he wanted to rent for the day. Well this amazing little car was an hour outside of Edinburgh so to make the time line of our wedding day run smoothly we had to find a spot to get married that was close to where we would pick up the car. It made the search criteria pretty interesting. Luck would have it though and we found the perfect castle just 10 minutes from the Healey.

Our wedding day was very relaxed. We chose to do a first look on the royal mile just outside of The Witchery where we were taking everyone for dinner. It was important to us to spend as much of our wedding day together as we could. In the afternoon we met our rag tag little group of guests at Castle Campbell where we were blessed with beautiful clouds and some serious wind but no rain. Our Humanist celebrant Peter in his awesome kilt led our little group up a dirt trail and out onto the grassy hills overlooking our Castle. When everyone was set and ready Brett and I walked up arm in arm with our bagpiper Andrew in tow. To this day (which is still fresh at only 365 days sense) Brett and I both get chills and brought right back to that moment when we hear bagpipe music. We highly recommend if you ever find yourself venturing into the Scottish hillside on vacation, to hire a bagpiper to follow you around. So worth it. The ceremony felt surreal as I’m sure lots of brides will tell you. And the rest of the day flew by. We got one last jaunt in the Healey before returning it, and with the big moment over we put the top down and let the wind have at my hair. Dinner at The Witchery was fantastic. Our group was so small that we just reserved a long table in their dining room and let our guests choose what struck their fancy off the menu. Lets just say a lot of Whisky was tried by all.