Our wedding was perfectly intimate, genuine, and emotional. The day was overcast with intermittent rain due to the rare mid-October hurricane bands bringing low cloud coverage. These clouds interacted with the mountains in a beautiful, almost eerie way creating finger-like cloud projections reaching between the mountain layers into the valleys. The rain stopped for our beautiful first look at our ceremony site. It was important to Jordan and me to have that moment to be just us, and instantly, all the nerves leading to that moment washed away. Our officiant, who is a dear friend of ours, described to our 28 guests that the rain symbolizes cleansing and new beginnings. The live music set the ambiance for us to share our most honest emotions as we spoke our original vows to one another.

For our unity ritual, we combined whiskeys to be aged together. We bought a small oak barrel with our names and date engraved in it along with two separate glass beakers filled with whiskey and rye. We chose this as our unity because the word whiskey in its original Gaelic form translates to water of life. Also, the symbolism of the drops we each added would become impossible to separate, they would age together and become something different and better over time. ~ Chelsea