Honeymoon!
We booked our honeymoon yesterday! We’ll be going to Excellence Riviera Cancun in Riviera Maya, Mexico from May 1 – 8, 2011. Check out the website here: http://www.excellence-resorts.com/all-inclusive-resorts/riviera-cancun-mexico/cancun-overview.htm
If anyone’s been there or has been to Riviera Maya, please let us know any tips or activities/sites to see when we’re there in the comments or by email at JayandColleen@gmail.com. We would love to take a day to see some of the ruins, but don’t know where we’d go or how we’d go about it!
Mexico, here we come.
Some notes about flying
Airport info:
Anyone who is flying will probably want to fly into MacArthur Airport (ISP) in Islip, NY. Southwest & US Airways fly into ISP. All the major airlines fly into JFK or LaGuardia (LGA) (in Queens, NY). JetBlue tends to have decent sales into JFK while US Airways and American Airlines usually have pretty inexpensive flights into LGA if you book early enough. Southwest just opened up its schedule thru June 2011.
- ISP is 20 minutes from my parents and about 30 minutes from the hotels we’re going to book.
- JFK and LGA are a little bit over an hour away from my parents/the church and probably about an hour & twenty minutes away from the hotels.
- Don’t bother to fly into Newark. It’s in New Jersey and a pain in the butt to get to LI from it. Plus, you’ll get hit with the tolls entering NY from NJ and those are expensive.
If you are flying into JFK or LGA the day of the wedding, please leave a lot of time! There are always delays flying in & out of NY! Also, if it’s a really nice weekend, then there’s always a chance that you’ll run into traffic for people going out east or to the Hamptons.
Thanks!
200 Days Away!
As of October 11, 2010, we are 200 days away from our wedding day! Hooray!
Things are moving along really well – we have a wedding dress, DJ, photographer, bridal party dresses, and limo done so far and are thisclose to finalizing with the hotels and ordering Save the Dates so stay tuned for the hotel info soon. Also, Colleen had to special order a few different wedding rings to see what matched her engagement ring the best and those should be in any day now!
P.S. We have two stores down for the registry. One more to go.
Engagement Party Toast
Here’s (most of) the toast that Lee (Colleen’s dad) gave at Jay and Colleen’s engagement party on August 7, 2010. Thanks to Clif for recording it!
Registry and other updates
We began the process of our wedding registry today! We got one store almost done but still have a little more to go and then two more stores to get through. It was exciting and standing in the kitchen section of the store they were in almost made Colleen want to start baking things. Maybe if she gets some of the baking stuff on the list, she’ll have no choice…
We are going to have a lot more updates now that the ball is rolling, so bookmark us and come back soon!
Reception Hall
Thanks to some great groundwork by Colleen’s parents, we had the reception halls limited to only 3 choices. We visited all three of them today and made our decision.
We will be getting married at St. Anthony’s of Padua’s in Rocky Point on April 29, 2011 and then holding our reception at Giorgio’s at Fox Hill afterwards. Giorgio’s works with two different local hotels that will bus people to/from. This is especially great for guests who want to go back to the hotel in between the ceremony & cocktail hour and then catch the shuttle from the hotel to the hall. It’s about 11 miles from the church to Giorgio’s and I think an additional like 6 miles from Giorgio’s to the hotel. Basically, it’s a good option for guests who want to drink at the wedding and not worry about driving. Right now, we’re looking at a 4:00pm ceremony and a 6:30pm reception start time. We’ll let you know if anything changes!
And the wedding date is…
We have an official wedding date!
P.S. Thank you so much to everyone who came out to Buffalo Brothers last Friday night. We had an awesome time that night and the rest of the weekend. Thank you!!
P.P.S. Stay tuned sometime this weekend because we’ll put new pictures up and tell another story from the Jay and Colleen history book…
Birthday/Engagement Party Update
I know that this is last minute but we spent a while trying to decide on a location to have the party. We wanted to take people downtown to “show off” Raleigh a little bit but we didn’t know how many people had cars or what time people would be arriving in town and how they would contact us if they got lost, yadda yadda yadda. We also wanted people to be able to enjoy themselves a bit and didn’t want anyone to have to worry about drinking and driving. So we decided to just have everyone meet at Buffalo Brothers, a restaurant/bar that’s very close to the Wingate by Wyndham hotel. We’ll still be meeting at 8pm.
Here are directions and a map to Buffalo Brothers from the hotel. We hope to see everyone there! Please let us know either in the comments or over Twitter if you think you’ll be there because we need to give the restaurant an semi-accurate count.
2. Turn right at Capital Blvd/North Blvd 0.7 mi
3. Make a U-turn. Destination will be on the right 220 ft
Wedding Updates Thru Media
From time to time, we’ll be adding in media such as videos and podcasts. These will be on a variety of subjects but will also continue to tell the conclusion of the story of how we ended up dating, handled long-distance, and ended up in Raleigh, NC. Check out our “About Us” page for the story of how we met. Stay tuned for those!
And We’re Off!
Hello, everyone! Since we got engaged on February 10, 2010 (you can read the story from Colleen’s POV here), we haven’t had a lot of time to start any official planning because I was in London for a week. Now that I’m back and have had a total of approximately 24 hours of flying time to scour through tons of bridal magazines since we got engaged, it’s time to get started.
The wedding will happen on Long Island, NY – where I grew up. There is not date set, but we will be meeting with a priest and looking at reception halls when we go up to LI on April 3 so hopefully we will have a date by Easter (April 4). For now, it’s a lot of ground work from afar, such as looking at the websites for different halls to see where we want to look.
That’s it for now, but we’ll be updating this quite frequently so stay tuned 🙂