Tikis in Paradise: Hali'maile General Store Rehearsal Dinner

Our day was just getting started once we got our nails done. After our fun Wahine Party we headed back to our cottage at Mama's Fish House to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. We got ourselves all prettied-up, got gifts together for everyone and found that almost everyone was wearing orange in their outfits without it being planned. It looked pretty fabulous for pictures!

Getting dolled up.

Presents for our parents and Sara.

Tikis in Paradise: Wahine Party

The Wahine party was just for the ladies. No boys allowed as Nicki so awesomly put on the invitations. A day of lunch and getting our nails done before the wedding the next day.

We all meet-up in Kahului at Da Kitchen, a locals' favorite, for some Hawaiian grinds. Their menu is pretty extensive and had something for everyone on it. A few who'd never had musubi before were intrigued by it and I encouraged them to give it a try. Everyone who did, loved it. Especially, Mykie!

Love the bracelets in our wedding colors given to me by Honey at my first bridal shower.

Tikis in Paradise: Cock n Hen Party

We went on our Cock n Hen party with all of our friends that came to the wedding the Thursday night before the wedding. We booked tickets on the Pride of Maui for their sunset dinner cruise. We hit the water on boat for a few hours of live music, open bar and an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Lise, Nicki, Jon, Traci, Drew, Kimmy, Matt, Heather and Lars. 

Due to Hurricane Daniel, the weather on Maui started to take a turn on Thursday. It became more windy resulting in choppier water. But, that didn't stop us from enjoying out time at sea. Hey, you never know what's going to happen when you are on a tropical island.

Tikis in Paradise: Welcome Hukilau Part 'Ekolu

Ok, we were just joking around when we said that the party got really crazy after the parents left. We got all that craziness out in our 20s and early 30s. Well, unless you call getting crazy playing with sparklers. We aren't talking about the sucky sparklers they have on the west coast either. We are talking about the old-school metal sparklers that leave tracers. These sparklers were the real deal!

Since our Welcome Hukilau was on the 4th of July, we put together cute little sparkler packets for all our our guests. Yes, we really did think of everything. We used these great templates that I downloaded from Twig & Thistle. Used the straw tags, too. Didn't end up using the matchbox covers because Mama's Fish House had their own cute matches and it saved me a little time. We gave each of our guests a sparkler packet and everyone had a ton of fun with them.

Loved finding REAL sparklers to use for these. 

Tikis in Paradise: Welcome Hukilau Part 'Elua

After everyone was feed and happy, we decided to take them over to the beach to show them where we would be getting married on Saturday. Just as we were rounding everyone up, we saw a rainbow stretch across the sky. It was the first of many rainbows that we would see during our wedding week; a sign of good blessings on our marriage.

There's a reason they call it the rainbow state. 

Tikis in Paradise: Welcome Hukilau

After our day at Baldwin Beach, we invited everyone to join us for a Welcome Hukilau. This hukilau was packed full of all kinds of excitement from dinner, to giving out of town bags, to crazy fun with sparklers to celebrate the 4th of July to showing everyone the wedding ceremony location to celebrating a birthday. Yes, so much in one night!

Because of that, we'll be splitting this night up into two posts. There's just so many pictures to share! Of course, we won't be posting all of them. You will just have to make sure to come to our Portland celebration to see all of the pictures.

Nicki, Mykie and I left the beach early to pick up some trays of food from Da Kitchen and get everything set up. We though it'd make things a lot easier for everyone to have the main food catered and only have to add a couple smaller things ourselves. Plus, Da Kitchen has great local grinds and their catering is really affordable. We highly recommend them when you are on the islands.

We served kalua pork, chow fun noodles, a salad of organic spring mix, tropical fruits and papaya poppy seed dressing, taro and Hawaiian sweet bread rolls, tropical fruits and some of our favorite local snacks like Hurricane Popcorn. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food and was ready to big in and eat after a long day at the beach. We also set up a self-serve bar of local liquors like coconut vodka and tropical fruit juices.

Cutting up papaya for the salad. 

Tikis in Paradise: A Day at Baldwin Beach

On the 4th of July, we kicked off the first day of a full wedding week of activities! It was perfect starting it with a holiday bang. We headed to Baldwin beach for the day and invited everyone to join us before the Welcome Hukilau that night.

Now we picked Baldwin beach because of it's location, the safe lagoon they had that was great for keiki (Hawaiian for children) to swim and its big white sand beach with plenty of room around the lagoon. Or at least it had been that way for years and had been that way the last time we were there in January. Not so much that way when we showed up that day.

None of these trees were on the beach before. 

Tikis in Paradise: Aloha from Paradise

Aloha! We are doing well and having a blast in paradise! Everyone has been joining us the last couple days on Maui and we officially kicked off the wedding week on the 4th of July with a welcome party. It's been great seeing all of our hard work finally start to come together.

Of course, now we are really busy with all things wedding. But, we promise to post as we can and continue to give you updates on our trip and wedding. Especially since our amazing wedding photographer, Sara Sanger, is already sending us links to our pictures! So excited to already be getting to see some of those. A little sneak peak for all of you from our trip to Baldwin beach yesterday:

Almost everyone joined us for a day at Baldwin Beach. 

Reveal: Wedding Week Activities

Or How We Are Going to Fit a Whole Lot of Fun into 4 and Half Days!

One of the great things about having a destination wedding is all the days leading up to the actual wedding. All of the little ideas that you liked while looking for wedding inspiration can be given a chance to come to life. If you have 50 different ideas you like and only one day to do it all, you are going to have to cut out almost ALL of those ideas. I know, just thinking about it makes me sad, too.

We have three days of activities leading up to the wedding and one half day after the wedding. There are so many great things to do on Maui from sunset cruises to snorkeling to exploring the many beautiful beaches and so much more. Really, I could go on and on. Because of this it was in no way easy for us to decide what to do with our wedding guests and what was best for us to do on our weddingmoon. We wanted to show our guests an amazing time, but we also didn’t want them to have to break the bank to do it. We wanted to treat our guests to as much as we could, but we didn’t want to break our bank either. (Which really means putting it on a charge card. We all know how that goes, right?)

When selecting our wedding week activities we tried to find a middle ground on what we would invite guests to do with us. We wanted to make sure that they would all enjoy the activities and that we could cover the cost of some of them. We are asking our guests to travel to Maui after all and they deserve lots of little extras as a result of it. We came up with the following: