Lisa and Alex, from the US, decided to elope with a few family members in tow. They picked the Isle of Skye in Scotland as their location because of it’s beauty and the fact that some of their family members had never even left America before!
“A big part of our relationship is travel, so we knew we wanted to have a destination wedding”, said the bride. “We did a lot of research before we came across a photo of Isle of Skye and fell in love. We wanted our wedding day to be laid back and intimate so we decided to only invite our closest family.”
“We opted to not have a traditional ceremony and reception venue. We got ready in an Airbnb and then found a spot for our ceremony in the mountains. There are a few castles on Skye that we looked into, but they didn’t feel very us. We didn’t know the exact location of our ceremony until the day of the wedding. We knew we wanted to have the ceremony in the Quiraing, but we didn’t have time to scout it out the day before. So on the day of the wedding, we drove until we found a spot that looked beautiful and pulled over. We got legally married back at home before going to Scotland, so our ceremony was short and simple, we just read our vows to each other. Almost as soon as our ceremony ended, it started raining. Our families hurried back to the cars, but Alex and I (and our photographer, Frankee) stayed out and took some rainy photos.”
The couple are wedding videographers so they decided to shoot their own video! “We also decided to shoot our own wedding video which was a really fun challenge for us”, she said. “We were so excited to edit the film that we started on the train back to Glasgow. I’m sure people wondered why we were crying so much!”
Their biggest cost was photography but they saved so much money by not having a traditional wedding format. In total they spent around $8000, including their flights and accommodation in Scotland. “We saved so much money by not having a venue. The Airbnb we rented was less than $300 per night and acted as both our place to get ready and eat dinner, but it was also accommodation for six of us. We also saved a lot by only having ten guests.”
“We loved being able to share our love of travel with our families”, the bride concluded. “We all spent about a week together in Scotland leading up to the wedding, and we had so much fun planning that.”
