A Plan To Elope in Iceland Hatches
How did we decide to elope?
...why on July 4th, and why in Iceland? Well, for years (no, this is not an exaggeration) we had been trying to figure out how to get married. If that sounds a bit ridiculous and overcomplicated, you have no idea. It’s a long story and we’ll do our best to summarize.
We have always, as long as we can remember, spent July 4th together, often just the two of us. We don’t always do anything out of the ordinary, but we liked the odds of always having our anniversary fall on a day we likely would never be working! Apart from that, we got engaged on a 4th of July several years back…
- July 4th, 2016 – We were engaged with what we fondly refer to as, “a bottle of dirt.” It was a gallon sized bottle of dirt from our local sapphire mine in Montana, which Ryan had picked up with the idea of mining together to find a gem for a wedding ring.
- July 4th, 2017 – We lived in Los Alamos, NM, and enjoyed a date to the annual fireworks show in next door White Rock. (Hard to plan a wedding when we'd just moved!)
- July 4th, 2018 – We now lived in Bozeman, MT, and spent the evening at our favorite fireworks watching spot on Waterworks hill over in Missoula. (Hurray for having just moved again!)
- July 4th, 2019 – We had moved to Whidbey Island, WA (sensing a trend yet?). However, this particular July 4th we went to a workshop in Port Townsend called “With These Rings,” where we handmade each other’s wedding bands.
It was at this point in 2019 we found ourselves in full swing of wedding planning, because we’d decided that despite our rather cumbersome tendency to be moving every f*&%#@$ year, we still wanted to get married.
We had a venue all ironed out not once but twice, and were in the midst of booking food, drinks, florists, a photographer, the whole nine yards. Yes. We got to this point twice. We have the full archives to prove it – contact lists, excel spreadsheets diagraming and organizing everything, signed contracts, important email exchanges, the whole 9 yards. You name it, we did it. Twice. I promise.
But going through this process only served to convince us, both times, that a traditional wedding was not for us. Simply put, we didn’t like The Hype of a Wedding. In our opinion, society has built up a lot of unnecessary expectations around what a wedding should be and how it should be done, so much so that we perhaps forget what the important point in all of it is: the union of two people. We lamented over the fact that a lot of couples we know, or read about, said they don’t even remember their wedding day. We wanted to remember ours and not have it be a blur and whirlwind, all over within a few hours’ time.
Weddings tend to also have a vibe of, “This is where our story begins,” and that feeling didn’t resonate with us anymore, because we already had 10 years of adventures together. “Begins?” we thought to ourselves, “But we are already on chapter 27!”
In fact we were more excited about planning our dream honeymoon destination, which was not somewhere tropical as your might expect, but we’d decided was either Iceland or Scotland. Our hearts began running away on the Icelandic and Scottish country-sides, our internet searches were filled to the brim with research about all the things we wanted to see and do, our google drive was filling up with trip itineraries, our bookshelf starting to have its own section on these two countries, and our walls became peppered with National Geographic maps of Iceland and Scotland. A visitor to our house, spotting all these, even asked if we were originally from there.
The incompatibility of this detailed foreign adventure in contrast with our lack of enthusiasm for wedding planning at home finally came to a head one night when we were woefully scrolling through photos of Iceland yet again. Would we even have the resources left to have a trip here the same year we were to host a wedding? Wouldn’t it be nice to just elope and forgo all the stress of coordinating vendors? If we combined wedding with honeymoon, we’d get to do something romantic while also seeing a part of the world we wanted to see!
A couple of days later we met our photographer, Steph Zakas, in a phone call to discuss eloping in Iceland. Shall I say the rest is history? It really is. We cancelled our traditional wedding plans and started refocusing on eloping in Iceland. This was not a decision made lightly, but it was the right one for us and our circumstances. The rest of the elopement story went like this:
- July 4th, 2020 – The day we were supposed to get married in Iceland, but a little thing called COVID delayed us.
- July 4th, 2021 – We were married in Seltjarnarnes, Iceland, with an elopement day spent exploring the Snæfellsnes peninsula!
