The Groom

Here I am on the beach on D-Day (marrying Donna day), don't be deceived by the clouds, it was sweltering hot and sunny but there were a few clouds to give us a bit of reprieve.

If I look calm, it's because I was actually half-doped on Benadryl to keep the mozzy-bites down.

The combination of heat and antihistamine meant I spent most of the day in a blissful daze, only just aware of what was going on around me, enough to be able to speak my vows on cue and smile for the photos.

Actually I think half the time the smile was a side-effect of the drugs.

This was Gina's camera btw, she took some good snaps.

Hedge Yourself

The GBP is becoming more and more worthless everyday and inflation is just around the corner - summer/autumn by my reckoning, the time to move you savings is now if you want to keep their value.

I have just opened an account at BullionVault to purchase gold. In fact currently they are even giving a free gram of gold, plus £1, $1 and €1 deposited into your BullionVault account for you to sell straight away. If you choose to sign up to BullionVault, please use the link I provide here as I get an extra comission (you can do the same on your own blog once your account is set up).

Another way of hedging, though I'm not so sure of it's potential now is through Zopa. At the time of this post, they are still offering 9.1% ROI, but will there be a rise in defaults as the year rolls out? Only time will tell but the ability to spread your lending by as little as £10 deadens the risk. Again the link I provide is an affiliation link which gives me a small bonus, so much appreciation if you use the link to sign up.

This is just what I'm doing to hedge our savings against potential inflation. The truth is it's almost, but not dead, certain and I'm not financial advisor. I recommend doing your own research on gold but I found this article from The Motley Fool very helpful, in fact TMF are a good source of financial wisdom on many fronts - I'd recommend searching their archives.

Err, that's it for now.

Just added Twitter feed to the sidebar...

But first, an apology.

This blog has been inactive for over a year. I am ashamed. I have been thinking about it and about the wedding photos.

I'll start to get them up soon. The truth is I've been put off the huge task of editing them and editing our videos - but if I can get one or two up it's better than nothing right?

Critters

For some reason, it seemed like the animal kingdom was doing it's best to stop the wedding (or at least ruin the photo's). After my encounter with Zooey, my sister-in-laws possessed cat, upon landing in Maui I was set upon by mosquitoes. At first I was bit in the hand, then on the side of my forehead. By day three the little b*s had caused me ear to swell double its size (visible on some of the Luau photo's).

Here's a comparison ear-to-ear:

 

As if my ego  wasn't bruised enough, Donna made me wear some sort of plastic face mask the night before the big day which made me look like an android from the movie A.I.:

 Jude Wes

Must Do Checklist: The Luau

It's one of those extremely expensive tourist things that has to be done, so here we are queuing on the beach, near twilight waiting to get our hands on those free complimentary Mai Tai's.

To be fair, it was a free bar and all you can eat, what else could you ask for?

Here's the pig going into the ground. For those that don't know, a Luau is where they cook a whole pig in the ground before serving it up.

View photo's of the Luau

Basil Tomatoes

So we finally settled in and on the first night we decided to all go out together and sample some of the local cuisine. Mike recommended Basil Tomatoes just down the road from Ka'anapali. I have a video of the event but I haven't got round to editing yet.

Some of the highlights include being served by the militant waitress we nicknamed 'butch' (wait till you see the video) and being served purified 'clear' milk (also in the video).

Mike had already finished his drink at this point. I guess no one has mentioned to him that you toast first and then drink.

Since we paid for the meal on my card, we ended up with a fistful of dollars. I didn't get to play with it long, as Donna was already comfortably getting ready to be in wife-mode.

View the photo's

Maui

After arriving overnight, driving in the dark along the coast to find the Ka'anapali Villas where we would be staying we finally got to glimpse the beauty of the island of Maui. Far left is Donna overlooking a place where whales can be spotted. Unfortunately we were too early in the season to see them.

Left is a lava rock beach close to Makena Cove, south of the island where we were 3 days from sealing the deal.

Below, some trees behind Makena Beach where I was ambushed by a Mosquito and Donna standing on Makena Beach.

See these photo's on Facebook

Coffee Anyone?

How do you like the new blog? I decided to disenfranchise the blog from AAF website and we originally experimented with Wordpress.

Although Wordpress has great customizable features, it's a bit restricted so we've gone for the old Blogspot domain.

We’ll continue to post images from the Maui trip and the Wedding of course, but this is going to allow us to move beyond and merge it with our current activities at a later stage.

We're Moving!

No, not physically, but our 'Maui Wedding' blog discontinues at this address from here on!

Some people have voiced concern that they are unable to access at this server, so to make it more easy (especially for those a little more technically challenged) we have moved to a new domain and created a new blog:

Saturday Morning Coffee

All the posts here have been transferred over to SMC and the photo journey will continue whilst we bring the blog screaming into the present.

This Maui Wedding blog will remain here for the meantime. But update your shortcuts lest one day you find this blog disappears!

Flying Cattle

We finally set out from Vancouver airport on 24th October, Gina is pictured above, at the check-in. I guess we were all so excited about going that we didn't think that the taxi ride to the airport would get us there so punctually. As you can see in the picture the place looked a bit empty. At first we thought it was going to be a quiet flight....until we realised that we were about an hour too early. We were there before the check-in desks were even open. Now that's excited.

Anyway once we were finally on the flight we realised that this holiday chartering business was not as comfy as one would like. The 5 hours on the flight with WestJet felt longer than the 8 hours from Heathrow to Calgary with Air Canada. WestJet were cheap, so cheap that they even felt they could charge us extra for in-flight video entertainment. The only problem is if you didn't want to pay you still had to face the video screen that had been installed on the back of every chair, blinking away an advertisement that bragged the advantages of buying the rights to view more then the advertisement itself. In the end the dumb video was out of order anyway and no one would get a chance to sample the fine array of movies they would've had to offer. Gina found a better use for the back of the chair in front of her and simply fell asleep. Nice one.

View the photo's