Leaving It All Behind
By Brandee Dishner | Photography by Kristin Vining Photography
Posted: Monday, Jul. 20, 2009
It all began with two promises. “Promise me,” he said, “if you are ever unhappy while you are planning the wedding, or if this becomes about other people and not us, we stop.” Nodding cheerfully, Sammi Aliff assured her fiance Brent Blake she would honor her promise.
Cake, photographers, flowers. Check, check and check. It was December and Sammi was beginning the preparations for her wedding set for the following spring. It had been a whirlwind of events that led her to this moment, and it all began just two months previous in October when a friend set her up on yet another blind date. “I thought, why not, my friend knows me well enough, and it would be fun to meet someone new,” she laughs. One Friday night dinner plus another date the following day and the couple was smitten. So it was no surprise he planned a proposal less than two months after they met.
Brent took her to the horse farm where she used to ride as a child. As the horses were being prepared, Brent suggested they walk around the nearby field. “What’s that over there?” Brent coyly asked pointing to a green blanket he saw in the distance. “Oh no! It looks like a fresh patch of grass, they must have just buried a horse,” Sammi said. When Brent encouraged her to look again, to Sammi’s surprise, she saw the fresh patch of green grass was in fact a blanket. As they got closer, she saw a picnic awaited them with flowers, champagne and delicious chocolate-covered strawberries. Soon enough, she was catching on. After the surprise proposal, Sammi found another surprise as her favorite photographer, Kristin Vining, emerged from the woods across the pond. The entire proposal was captured on film!
No stranger to wedding magazines, Sammi had a folder filled with samples and pictures she’d began collecting from the age of 14. Soon she was in full swing, booking a florist, DJ and searching the Queen City for the perfect wedding venue. And then it happened. She woke up one morning and realized she had broken both of the promises she made to Brent: She was not happy and the weight of the wedding plans had become larger than life. Tossing out the folder and starting from square-one, the couple booked a week in March in Anguilla at the Cap Juluca Resort and decided to elope without looking back.
The laws of Anguilla required the couple to be on the island for 48 hours before getting married, providing plenty of time to make arrangements for their ceremony. “We met with the wedding planner from the resort,” Sammi recalls, “and within 30 minutes all of the details were planned, from the food to the cake to the flowers.” In true island style, the couple was driven to the courthouse in their bathing suits. “The simple and stress-free setting helped us to make it a time that focused completely on the two of us and not on the myriad of details most traditional weddings include,” Sammi says. Kristin Vining joined the couple to capture every moment and took Sammi’s bridal portraits the day before her wedding. “I do not believe that many brides can say they had their bridal portraits taken while standing on a cliff with waves crashing all around,” Sammi says excitedly.
Taking full advantage of their surroundings, the couple spent their days touring the island, eating tropical fare, indulging in massages and snorkeling the coral reefs. On their wedding day, March 20, they relaxed on the beach until 2 p.m. when they returned to their room to prepare for their 5 p.m. wedding. Just before their ceremony, Sammi decided to put a flower from the bushes outside of her room in her hair. The bride was so carefree, in fact, that she realized she had not planned for music at the wedding. Just in time, the resort came to the rescue and a steel drum band joined the island pastor at the altar. A private five-course dinner on the beach followed the ceremony including a wedding cake provided by the resort.
“The best thing about my wedding day was that it was relaxing from start to finish,” Sammi says. “I know if I would have done it any other way, I would have been too stressed to enjoy it. On that special day, I didn’t care about the flowers or the flavor of the cake. I just wanted to get married.”
