Aulani to WDW: The Lurkyloos' Anniversary Vow Renewal: THRILLING CONCLUSION 8/5!

[disbride713]

Great update Carrie and of course funny and amazing as always. Great photos, especially those of the sunset, they are postcard perfect!

 

[lurkyloo]

Ah, I think mine is going the same way then. I haven't gotten an error code yet but I've had several instances where I've turned it off and the lens wouldn't retract at all or would take several minutes to retract. My picture quality has gone way down as well (but they may be more to the fact that it's been dropped a few times ). And of course Sony doesn't make that model any more either

Oh no! You know, I've been eyeing Sony's new version of our beloved Hx-1, and it seems like it might be kind of awesome: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...iveASIN=B00BEHRQB4&linkCode=as2&tag=ludowd-20

Your Common Criminal Beach comment had me rolling on the floor! Just made a note of that for our future trip! Or as in Hana mau, ma'amau kanaka hana kalaima kahakai. At least that's what the Hawaiian Dictionary website spits out the translation so don't know how accurate that is. God bless the internet!

Looks like you guys had a great road trip around Hawaii!! The shaved ice looks really good - I would have had such a hard time choosing flavors!!

Yeah, it's a shame they limit you to 3... there's so much ice there, surely you could pack on 5!

oh.my.word!

I was rolling with these updates! First the B movie ranch tour (sorry Jurassic Park) with the scary bus and then the reform torture school and chemical shaved ice.

I especially appreciated the cows dialogue.

Gorgeous gorgeous sunset pictures

Note to self...mark ranch off list of possible tours....

...Unless you're a HUGE fan of You, Me and Dupree....

Well, I'm relieved that you survived the Killer Death Bus tour of movie sites. It was cool to recognize the scene from Jurassic Park (the dino Photoshop had me ). In the Lost display, did they have any exhibits explaining the ending?

Sounds like they should have! Also, after I posted that photo bomb, I wondered if Patrick's Photoshop was so good that people would think Kualoa Ranch sells novelty prints like that a la Disney's PhotoPass and not get the joke!

I got Oahu Revealed for my trip research, so it's amusing to hear the commentary from the book as you go through the sites. I remember reading about the heiau near the North Shore--would you say that was worth the diversion?

I guess for me it kinda wasn't cuz it was just the foundation left to see. But it seemed like catnip to our photographer buddies...

Nice job finding the animatronic sleeping turtle! I bet it was made by the same people that did the animatronic sleeping lion on the Safari ride at AK.

Wow - what an update. Let's see if I can remember all this - the boys going for a swim (almost), Giovanni's - I think read somewhere that it was good stuff, the burned down boy's home right across from the retirement home (I'm sure Theresa Caputo could find some spirits there), the burial ground with the hoodlums picking up the sacrifices, the dead turtle, the shaved ice, the tomcat, and the gorgeous sunsets. No scrolling finger needed there.

If only I could have described the day this concisely... woulda saved me HOURS!

Great update Carrie and of course funny and amazing as always. Great photos, especially those of the sunset, they are postcard perfect!

Hey, thanks! I'll tell Patrick!

 

[MAGICFOR2]

What a day! That crazy reform school is an even better story (I think?)than I expected it to be in real life. So creepy and the pics are great! I wonder what the sacrifice was about at the ruins - and then the mini-van on cleanup duty - some family member coming by to recover aunt Minnie before the convalescent home finds her?

Glad you liked the shrimp truck shrimp, but I agree, peeling all the legs off gets really old - too much work to eat very often, I'm thinking.

Amazing sunset pics! I somehow missed out on seeing any sunsets in a whole week there - not sure how that happened, but another reason for a do-over!

 

[Disneybuckeye]

Another great updated Carrie! My co-workers now think I am completely nuts as I sit in my cube laughing. That picture of Patrick talking an you ignoring is a common occurance in our house. Unfortunately sometimes I forget to tune back in when it is something I relly do care about. Oh well, that is his job to repeat it back if need be.

Common Criminal Beach! Will have to remember that one. I always tell my family we are eating with the commoners at DW when we don't have ADRs so they would expect something like that from me.

I also give you credit for eating at the ghetto bus. My husband probably would have looked at me, I would have shook my head, and we would have driven on by. I also agree with the fork thing.

Looking forward to seeing how the cliff hanger plays out.

As always, thank for posting!

 

[lurkyloo]

What a day! That crazy reform school is an even better story (I think?)than I expected it to be in real life. So creepy and the pics are great! I wonder what the sacrifice was about at the ruins - and then the mini-van on cleanup duty - some family member coming by to recover aunt Minnie before the convalescent home finds her?

I like this theory!

Amazing sunset pics! I somehow missed out on seeing any sunsets in a whole week there - not sure how that happened, but another reason for a do-over!

Whaaaa...? Not a single Hawaiian sunset?!! Better keep that one under your hat or the Hawaii Travel Police will show up on your doorstep to drag you back there! Although....

Another great updated Carrie! My co-workers now think I am completely nuts as I sit in my cube laughing. That picture of Patrick talking an you ignoring is a common occurance in our house. Unfortunately sometimes I forget to tune back in when it is something I relly do care about. Oh well, that is his job to repeat it back if need be.

See, that's what I'm always saying!

Common Criminal Beach! Will have to remember that one. I always tell my family we are eating with the commoners at DW when we don't have ADRs so they would expect something like that from me.

 

[chepic]

love the photo of the bikes with the killer dog in front!!

cheryl

 

[librarygeek]

The movie tour actually looks really cool! The Jurassic Park stuff is definitely the best. Though your description of the bus has me a little hesitant... and your captions for the cow pictures had me laughing out loud!

I have to admit, that food truck with the shrimp does look pretty sketchy! The food looked decent though I don't know if it would seem like a must do to me. The shaved ice, on the other hand, looks fantastic... though I love fruity flavored things! That looks much more appealing than the typical chunky sno-cones we get here that are basically chunks of ice with flavoring.

 

[lurkyloo]

Today was our anniversary! Five years ago that morning, Patrick and were gettin’ hitched in Morocco at Epcot! It’s funny to think that Aulani was still just a glimmer in Disney’s eye when we got married, and here we were renewing our vows in this pop-up piece of paradise just a few years later!

The day dawned... well, I dunno how it dawned, really, cuz you can’t see the sunrise at Aulani when your room is located on the Peoplemover track! I was awake at 4:00am to meet Sarah, the cosmetologist I’d hired to do my hair and makeup.

She actually showed up a few minutes early, which was great. I thought the light in that cavelike Aulani room was going to be a problem, but she set me up on a chair just inside the bathroom door and at least it was even. The biggest problem was that she couldn’t get her airbrush to work. She mentioned that she’d had an issue before at Aulani with a flat iron that didn’t work, and since the airbrush had worked at her house that morning, she thought maybe there was something weird with the wiring at the resort. She was pretty distressed about it, so I said regular makeup would be fine. It was heavier than I wanted, but there wasn’t really anything we could do…

We hit it off immediately—it turns out she lived in LA for a while, in the crazy-ornate Chinese-themed apartment building next door to Grauman’s Chinese Theater! (…I’d prolly better not tell you that the reason she left LA was that one of her neighbors committed a murder or you’ll NEVER come visit me!). She was really receptive to my directions/comments, which was a big plus after my experience with the makeup artist who did me up for our retro photo shoot at California Adventure the week before (I’d had to push to get her to use the colors I wanted, and then she didn’t do eye makeup anything like the pictures I’d sent her).

Here’s a little sneak peek at how my vow renewal look turned out...

The only thing I didn’t like were the false eyelashes. Sarah wanted to do strip lashes, but I prefer individual lashes done just on the ends. She was game for it, but she didn’t trim them down to various lengths to incorporate them more naturally, so I just had a few huge butterfly lashes on the ends, which felt weird. They don’t seem too TOO noticeable in most of the photos, though!

At some point, Patrick stumbled out of bed and started getting into the outfit I’d painstakingly assembled for him—it was so much easier for the wedding, when all I’d had to do to fulfill his request to “look like James Bond” was rent a classic tuxedo! (I’ll go into the whole vow renewal outfit-planning story in excruciating detail in my planning journal eventually, if you need some time wasted.)

Just like on the wedding day, I got a little flustered toward the end when I realized I hadn’t left enough time to get into my dress, but Sarah was a pro at helping me finish up while simultaneously packing her things. I’m still embarrassed about freaking out in front of the Roots on my wedding day, so hopefully I wasn’t too wild-eyed when I answered the door this time. Bless her heart, the first thing out of Jensey’s mouth was, “You look amazing!” and I instantly felt at ease.

I thought it would be neat to do another “first look” with Patrick, but it turned out to be funnier than it was romantic. Since we were staying in the same room, he had to do everything with his eyes closed after I got my dress on—pretty silly, really! So we ended up with a lot of “reverse getting-ready” shots of the “bride” helping the “groom” into his outfit instead of the traditional bridesmaids-helping-the-bride thing. Tee hee!

I loved the matching gingham cufflinks and tie I got Patrick from this Etsy seller!

“Wow, it’s like I haven’t seen you in 2 whole minutes!”

“Sssssshhhhhhut up...”

We headed down to the lobby to meet our wedding coordinator, Elena. The plan was for her to take Patrick down to the Jacuzzi—er, ceremony site first so I could make my grand entrance. Feels kinda silly when there are only 2 of you and you’ve been together all morning, but hey...


Aww.... Mirror shot!!!

I’m sure this happens to everyone, but it seems like we always look super-goofy in our first run of photos during a shoot with the Roots. Next time maybe I should schedule in 20 minutes of practice where they just pretend to take pictures.

Ever since the Roots told us that nearly every couple falls into what they call “grooming” at some point during a shoot, we’ve tried to get that out of our systems early on...

Aaaaand.....SWITCH!!!

Nate followed when Elena spirited Patrick away, leaving me and Jensey to our own devices up on the lobby balcony.

“So.... wanna take my picture or something...?”

Because it’s so rare that Jensey and I get any solo time, we immediately fell into conversation and barely remembered to take any photos at all. I think she might’ve taken these with one hand while gesticulating with the other to illustrate a story.

This was really sweet: Elena asked me to have the Etsy seller who made my bouquet send it straight to her office instead of just to the hotel, and she added this little surprise for me:

 

[lurkyloo]

It seemed like a long time before Elena came back to get me and Jensey, so we just kept gabbing.

“Blah, blah, blah, cupcakes”—SNAP!

“Blah, blah, blah, Skinnygirl-tinis”—SNAP!

Meanwhile, Nate and Patrick were down at Alohi Pointe, probably wondering what was taking us girls so long. Luckily, there were plenty of things to photograph while they waited.

And there it is—all the horror of my nightmares about using a Jacuzzi as a ceremony site encapsulated in one photo!

Meanwhile, my procession through the pool area toward the altar was taking forEVER because I kept stopping to be FIERCE!

And also GOOFY!

This is either Patrick’s “Don’t tell Carrie I’m clasping my hands in that way that makes grooms look like they gotta use the john” face or his “I am totally about to jump in this Jacuzzi" face...

We’d asked to have our ceremony pushed forward to 8am instead of their usual 9, hoping there’d be nobody around at that hour. I think we did pretty well.

 

[lurkyloo]

The officiant, Rev. Kimo Taylor, showed us where to stand, I guess for the best photos. I was relieved to see that, between the table with my bouquet on it and the music stand for the ukulele player, the place looked a little bit more like a ceremony venue and less like a place for portly guys in Speedos to float around drinking mai tais.

I was happy to find that the music played such a big part in the ceremony. When I’d been working on the order of service with Rev. Kimo, I’d slashed a lot of the traditional stuff out of his standard ceremony because it pertained to guests/children, neither of which we’d have, or it was the same traditional stuff I cut out of our wedding ceremony cuz it sets my teeth on edge. So I was worried that the experience we’d paid all this money for would only last about 5 minutes. But the way they do it, you actually pause in places to enjoy an entire song by the musician you choose, and the music rounds out the ceremony.

It was around about, oh, HERE, that I realized Rev. Kimo was not doing the ceremony we’d agreed on....

I’ve detailed this in the Officiant section of my planning journal, but basically, I was not crazy about Rev. Kimo’s standard vow renewal ceremonies—the vaguely religious one or the nondenominational one—because both seemed like he’d just taken a regular wedding ceremony and stuck the word “again” after any pledges or directives. Plus, there were some ceremonial acts I wanted to take out (yes, even though they were nice Hawaiian traditions) because they seemed awkward—for example, we weren’t using the leis that came with our package, so the lei ceremony woulda looked pretty silly!

Via email, Rev. Kimo approved the hybrid ceremony I’d created by combining his with some quotations from our original ceremony and rewording the awkward bits about kids and guests. So imagine my surprise during our vow renewal ceremony when he launched into all the generic stuff I’d cut out. I gave Patrick a funny look, and then my heart sank when Rev. Kimo skipped over the quotes I’d added too.

It was later confirmed that he completely forgot we’d customized the ceremony, even though he’d emailed me just 2 weeks before to say that he’d received the one I sent. I guess he keeps files on each couple, and when he looked in ours that morning there was nothing about a custom ceremony, so he just grabbed the standard one. I understand that it’s an honest mistake, and it only kinda bummed me out at the time, but that’s because this was just a vow renewal. If this had been my real wedding, I would have FREAKED OUT!

However, all of this was forgotten when Patrick began his vows. Originally, I thought maybe we’d just repeat the vows we’d each written for our wedding as a sort of reminder. But Patrick expressed a surprisingly strong opinion that we write new vows for our renewal. So we sat down the night before and each wrote out what we would say. I was pretty pleased with mine. They followed all the rules of public speaking: clear, concise, sincere and brief. But Patrick’s vows put mine to shame.

The depth of his sincerity, the unguarded emotion, and the pure love that poured straight from his heart overwhelmed me as he blinked back tears. I didn’t cry at our wedding, but I was crying now...

And of course, he made me laugh too!

That was a tough act to follow. I cringed inwardly as I read my superficial-sounding vows and promised myself I’d do better next time.... cuz there’s gonna have to be a next time now!

 

[lurkyloo]

Rev. Kimo had us do a sort of faux ring exchange where we placed our hands on each other’s ring as we repeated the promises of the traditional ceremony.

After the kiss, our ukulele player said he had a very special song to play and then launched into my secret favorite Disney song, “A Whole New World.” I was so surprised and delighted that I nearly cried again—it didn’t even occur to me that Patrick had cribbed him before the ceremony.

We’re such nerds, we even started singing along a little... I did hold my breath when he launched into another Disney song (we’d actually requested traditional Hawaiian music instead of Disney songs, just cuz there are so many I don’t like), but it turned out to be “You’ll Be In My Heart” from Tarzan, which we both like.

I’m not sure if we were supposed to, but both of us were compelled to applaud the guy when he finished—he did such a great job!

At the end, Rev. Kimo had us join hands again so he could perform the traditional Hawaiian conch blessing (at least, I think it’s a Hawaiian tradition... Maybe it’s just a Kimo tradition!)

 

[lurkyloo]

It was then that we got our only looky-loo, who sauntered up and planted herself behind Elena.


“I heard a conch. Where’s the luau at?”

And then it was over... sorta. The ukulele player launched into another song, so we stood around to listen while Rev. Kimo packed up quicker than that nun in Virgin America’s irritating inflight safety video!

Trouble is, Rev. Kimo packed up so quickly, Patrick had to chase him down with his tip!

This became my favorite spot in all of Aulani!

Up Next: Photo-shooting Around the Bay, “Reception” at ‘AMA ‘AMA & Anniversary Cake!

 

[lurkyloo]

love the photo of the bikes with the killer dog in front!!

cheryl

Yeah, that one feels like it could be a Root photo if it had the correct exposure!

The movie tour actually looks really cool! The Jurassic Park stuff is definitely the best. Though your description of the bus has me a little hesitant... and your captions for the cow pictures had me laughing out loud!

I have to admit, that food truck with the shrimp does look pretty sketchy! The food looked decent though I don't know if it would seem like a must do to me. The shaved ice, on the other hand, looks fantastic... though I love fruity flavored things! That looks much more appealing than the typical chunky sno-cones we get here that are basically chunks of ice with flavoring.

Yes! I think you would love Hawaiian shave ice. The texture is so appealingly fluffy!

 

[DaveinFallsChurch]

Beautiful pictures!! Although, have to be honest that my fav was the one with the two of you right after the conch was blown.

Congrats again!

 

[jedijill]

Gorgeous! You both look wonderful...sorry the good Rev didn't have his stuff straight but it looked like a beautiful ceremony.

Jill in CO

 

[burly]

So Lovely.......

 

[AGPrincess]

Loving all the gorgeous Root photos! Your bouquet was so pretty!

 

[rileyroosmom]

Carrie, I've been a lurker on all of your threads. Never posted anything, cause I'm just not that cool and always sound like a dork. Your vow renewal made me want to take the chance and post. You look stunning, old Hollywood glamor, that might not have been the look you were going for, so then I'd be a dork! The pictures are stunning, but wouldn't have expected anything else from the Roots. You and Patrick look like such a fun couple and so in love! I wish you a long and happy life together from many, many years.

I love your writing style, so much information. Your trips always look fantastic, but I have to say I was very disappointed in your people mover track view. That is not what I would expect a view in Hawaii to look like.

Can't wait to read more.
Laura

 

[wiigirl]

So very beautiful!

 

[Mom2m&k]

Gorgeous simply gorgeous!!