Destination: Maui

I'm a water baby. To the core. I was born with the river in my backyard and lived on the Hawaiian islands when I was younger. I just can't get enough of the water. I'm also a beach baby. I LOVE the beach and can literally spend all day just laying and swimming at the beach. I love vintage Hawaiiana and all things tropical.

Once Drew and I realized that we weren't going to be able to have the wedding of OUR dreams in Portland, we knew we wanted to go somewhere tropical. But, where? We actually looked into Mexico for a bit because we thought it was going to be cheaper than Hawaii. Once we crunched numbers we realized it wasn't.

Once decided, we never thought twice about not having our wedding on Maui. We knew that was the perfect place to have our destination wedding. I particularly did. (See first paragraph.) The one setback was knowing that not all of our family would be able to attend. To make it up to them, we decided to have a very small intimate wedding on Maui and hold a second reception at home in Portland, Oregon.

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We researched a ton on-line and through TheKnot Hawaii community board. Shout out to my Hawaiian wahines I have planned along side! Thank you so much for all of your input, help and just being there. I am grateful for all of the friends I have made along the way.

Some of the locations we looked into:

*Honua Kai Lani aka Sugarman Estates- Very pretty location, but just not us. It was also a lot more than we wanted to pay for a location since we were having such an intimate wedding.

Sugarman Estates
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*Haiku Mill- This place is simply amazing. If only it was on the beach. We really wanted a beach front ceremony. How could we got to Maui to get married and not have the ocean as the backdrop during our ceremony? It also was more than we wanted to spend on a venue.

Haiku Mill
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*Olowalu Plantation House- This one, too is very pretty. It's very popular among brides on TheKnot Hawaii board, as well. We wanted to get married somewhere that not everyone else was getting married at. We wanted something different. We still wanted something within our price range. Which this place also was not.

Olowalu Plantation House
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Each of these venues were beautiful in their own right. However, none of these places were what we were looking for. All of them cost what we thought was too much for 20 people. By this time we were feeling a bit discouraged and not sure it we were going to be able to find the venue that not only met our criteria, but was also us.

Did you have a difficult time finding your wedding venue?