Ashley & Jamie, an Anguilla Wedding

Ashley and Jamie's destination of choice for their beautiful wedding was Anguilla. The ceremony was held at a beautiful small stone church on the island and the reception was at Cap Juluca. Ashley and Jamie truly are two of the nicest and most considerate people we have ever met - the amount of effort and thought they put into making the journey easy for their guests was amazing. The weekend's events included a welcoming cocktail party, a beach barbecue at the Cuisinart Resort, sailing, croquet, tennis matches, yoga, beach fun, a rehearsal dinner at the cozy and wonderful Blanchards restaurant, and a "thank you for coming" departure brunch at Geraud's bakery (side note: Geraud makes absolutely to die for coconut croissants... out of this world)... and oh yeah, a totally gorgeous wedding reception at Cap Juluca.

Since we were there for a week we took a lot of photos... and I mean a ton! Trying to decide on what we would share on the blog was tough. Our original selection was about 100 photos:) Could you imagine how long that post would be! So after a long time sitting here posting and re-posting trying to keep the length of this reasonable, here are some of our favorites from the wedding....

Cap Juluca from the water

Jamie surprised his groomsmen by taking them out for an incredible sail around the island

Ashley's dance partner Matthew led a yoga class on the beach

Here is Ashley and Matthew showing off and goofing around with some dance moves on the beach

The Moroccan architecture at Cap Juluca was beautiful

Jamie and Ashley's father getting ready

We absolutely love this moment caught: Ashley's father helping her with her train and giving her a kiss just before they walked down the aisle

Ashley and Jamie exiting the church

The happily married couple

This is the setting for the reception dinner. Nothing short of breathtaking.

Jamie and Ashley had a very fun first dance

Loved the fireworks!

The following images are from our amazing Day After shoot with Ashley and Jamie (and Elysium Productions).

Enna snapped this cool "behind the scenes" shot

Congratulations Ashley and Jamie - and thank you for including us in your very special wedding!

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Here's our Anguilla Team:

We also can't neglect to mention how wonderful it was to work (again) with Alexis and her husband Brian of Unique Weddings by Alexis (working hard in this photo) and Alex and Julie of Elysium Productions. There was a lot of other talent working behind the scenes to make this wedding a gorgeous success, we're just so impressed at how perfect everything was. Here's the team from left to right:

Peter, Julie and Alex from Elysum Productions, ourselves ;) - Matt & Enna, Alexis and Brian

Anguilla... a First Glimpse

This blog post is just going to be torture - TORTURE - for Ashley and Jamie (sorry guys!)... We're going to start by sharing some of our first and last impressions of the island. A few wedding pictures will follow. :)

First of all, this was the view from our little apartment at Turtle's Nest Beach Resort.

The view didn't change much, but we photographed it repeatedly.

Here is our resort viewed from down the beach... notice how many people are on this beach?

Here is the inside of where we stayed. Turtles Nest Beach Resort was a perfect base for us - central to all of the wedding festivities, immediately on the beach, daily housecleaning and lots of beach towels, and lots and lots of peace and quiet. I highly recommend it.

A neighboring resort:

We spent as much time as possible exploring the island. Here's Matt in our sporty jeep - don't worry, he didn't shoot the wedding with that camera.

Traffic signs on the island are a little different, but fairly self-explanatory:

I took the following pictures on my "location scout" tour around the island... guess which spot we went back to for a "day after" shoot with the bride and groom?

There are lots of domestic farm animals on Anguilla - chickens, goats, cows, donkeys, and dogs. We didn't see any wildlife, except for many different kinds of water birds.

As we were driving Matt saw a desperate lady with a baby waving at cars for a ride. So he decided to pull over and help (because she really did look like she was having an emergency) only to be suckered into giving a ride for her whole family that was hiding behind the street sign awaiting such fools:) So they all piled in and we ended up driving them to do one small errand before dropping them off. Here we all are packed into the tiny jeep.

On our first day we checked out a couple of the locations for the wedding weekend. The Moroccan-themed architecture of Cap Juluca, beautiful rocks and beach, and dramatic sky let us know that we were in for a really beautiful wedding.

This is the inside of Pimms, the restaurant where the wedding reception was held.

After the wedding weekend we decided to treat ourselves and stay one extra day for a little r & r before returning to cold cold Boston. This meant that we got to watch Barack Obama's inauguration from Anguilla, and we chose a rustic beach bar for our inauguration base. Anguillians are probably 99.999% pro-Obama, so it was really exciting to watch the inauguration with them.

In the back of this crowd is a man wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. Matt later put on his B cap and introduced himself:) As Matt suspected, Robert is from the Boston area and we ended up having a nice long conversation on the beach. He's already emailed asking us when we'd blog these shots:) (Hi Robert!)

(the bartender is pointing to her goose bumps)

We're culling through the thousands of images we captured while on the island... stay tuned for more soon!