Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/127001
ayi the Countr One resourceful Pemberton couple hosted their dream farm wedding for 200 — on a shoestring budget Written by Anna Dupas Photographed by Anastasia Chomlack Why blow the budget on the big day? Newlyweds Carolyn Simons and Shandy Campos are proof that, when it comes to weddings, inexpensive doesn't have to mean cheap. The Pemberton couple pulled off the wedding of their dreams on a shoestring budget of just $8,000. Equally impressive, they planned it all in only four short months. Preparation for the whirlwind nuptials began shortly after Shandy, a former professional snowboarder, popped the question to his sportswear-designer girlfriend of a decade in the most unlikely of places — on a remote Ugandan mountainside, where the two had travelled in April 2012 to fulfill a shared dream of seeing mountain gorillas in the wild. It's a moment Carolyn says she will never forget: "In the presence of the giant silverback gorilla and the other 16 members of the gorilla family, all sweaty and exhausted and overly excited, Shandy popped the question — complete with a ring he made out of a jungle vine. [It was] one of the best days of my life." The proposal came as a complete surprise to Carolyn, who admits she had no clue at first how the two should go about staging their big day. "I have never been the type of person who has planned my wedding my whole life," she says. "Initially, I wanted it to be in the forest, but that turned out to be too difficult to pull off." Instead, she and Shandy opted to marry on a friend's farmyard, where they could create the "rustic vibe" they both desired. To do this, they stacked tree stumps on tables to serve as tiered towers, created favours for guests by wrapping plants in small burlap bags and assembling jars of homemade preserves, and tucked cutlery settings into brown paper packets, each rubber-stamped with the initials "S & C." A rustic vibe was one benefit of marrying on a farmyard; another was that it allowed the couple to invite as many friends as they wanted, freeing them from the dreaded task of trimming the guest list. "We had about 200 people, which was surprising considering we'd been thinking of having a small wedding," Carolyn says. The crowd even included a few very special guests of honour — a trio of alpacas. "I am just fascinated by them," she explains. "I really wanted to include them, so a friend in my knitting club who owns a few of them loaded them into a trailer and brought them over." Feeding a crowd of 200 is no small task, so the couple realweddings.ca p48-51_Carolyn+Shandy.indd 49 49 13-04-22 11:08 AM