Well, we did it. Our daughter is married. For those of you that may not have read my other blogs, the wedding happened in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We rented the Villa Mia (villamia2.com), Casa Gran Dia, and multiple hotel rooms at the Casa Iguana Hotel. All of these places are south of Puerto Vallarta in Mismoloya. We rented the villas for five days and used the owner of the Casa Gran Dia, Vanina, as our wedding coordinator. Vanina’s mother owns the Villa Mia, so we didn’t have a problem getting the two staffs to work together flawlessly.
Five days turned out to be a perfect amount of time to both prepare for the wedding and to relax after the wedding. It also gave us the time to stage a mini-family reunion in conjunction with the effort. If you ever decide to do a foreign destination wedding, encourage your guests to get passports instead of trying to use birth certificates and wedding licenses, etc. One guest got to spend several hours as a guest of the Mexican government until they decided that she was just a tourist with money to spend.
We had 60 guests for the five days. The villas were perfect and came with their own staff (18 in total). All of the staff were super attentive and made our stay extraordinary. During the wedding itself, there was one staff member who would pop up at my side with a fresh drink any time that my glass got down to the bottom third. It was an unbelievable time. In total we spent about $60,000 for the villas, hotels, food and drinks for five days for everyone. That also includes about a half dozen airline tickets from the states to Puerto Vallarta and back to include two first class tickets for my wife and myself. If you are doing this treat yourself first class. It helps to be pampered going and coming. My wife had enough stress without trying to fit into the back of the airplane with a wedding dress.
The $60,000 is higher than the $41,000 average for a wedding in the Washington, D.C. area where we live, or the $26,000 national average, but it was a five-day party with everything included for the 60 guests, as compared to a one day event in the D.C. area. In my upcoming book, I will give you all the details to include where to save money. It is about what we would have paid if we had taken everyone to an all-inclusive resort for a week, but because we had the villas to ourselves, no one had to compete for any resort amenities. Everything was ours for the week. Also, since I am a cigar smoker, I could smoke cigars to my heart’s content with no evil looks from anyone.
The wedding itself was spectacular and included a 10-piece Mariachi band that was as good as anything I’ve seen at the Kennedy Center. The food for the whole week was absolutely the best to include a lobster night. All of it was freshly prepared and no one got sick from the food at the villa. Guest after guest said that this wedding was the finest wedding that they have ever been to. The baker and florist who supported the event made a cake and bouquets that were exact replicas of pictures that we sent down as suggestions. The more information that you provide your wedding coordinator, the easier it is for that person to understand exactly what it is that you want.
Enjoy the photos and let me know what you think. I hope to have my book finished by the end of December to help other Fathers of the Bride provide the wedding that they want for their daughters.
