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Now that Heidi & I are married we have a whole life ahead of us, but I want to say a big thank you to some people (Heidi will have her own thanks).

Jen & Ronnie: Thank you for being the couple that allowed us to use your services on the day. Jen for being our officiant and our photographer, without those two pivotal things, a wedding isn’t truly possible. Ronnie for helping with photos and just being the general awesome guy that you are. Your generosity is always something I have loved about you both and if I can have a married life as good as yours, I will be happy forever.

Dan: Thanks for being my best man, not that you did much else but at least for being there to say “Are you sure you want to do this” and “Don’t do it”. Like any best man says to their friend, even though he knows that it is the right decision, he should make his friend stop and think for a second. Plus… your my best mate 😀

Heidi’s Parents: Thank you for allowing me to marry your daughter. I love her, cherish her and will do anything I can in life to protect her. I will love her till my last breath and every day I spend with her till then will be an enjoyment. Thank you for accepting me into your family and allowing me to be a part of your lives, you both make me feel like I am at home whenever we visit you.

Heidi’s Grandparents: Thank you for giving me the ring from your Grandfather (my wedding band belongs to Heidi’s Great Grandfather) and allowing me to keep this piece of family history alive. I also want to say thank you for the cake pans. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to make that cake! Your Granddaughter means a lot to me and having you both there meant a lot to us. I love that you have accepted me into the family and that I feel like I also have some grandparents. Since I lost my last grandparent a number of years ago, that feeling is special to me.

My Parents: Mum & Dad, thank you for being who you are. As much as I would have loved to have you with me and Heidi at the wedding, I understand the sacrifices you have to make. I know that you would have wanted to be there yourself, but like we told you, we will have a big party back home in Australia for everyone so you can see and meet Heidi yourself. Thank you for sending over my Grandmothers ring, it is something that I know Heidi loves and being able to keep a piece of family history alive makes me happy. One of the things that Grandpa taught me was to always love and cherish your wife, watching him make her breakfast in bed every morning was something that I will always remember, and will always try to do for Heidi, in honor of our family back home. Mum & Dad you mean the world to me and I truly hope that my married life is as good as yours has been. I can’t wait for you to meet Heidi.

Julia, Nate & Everyone at the Museum of Flight: Thank you so much for everything you did. Allowing us the use of RA001 was a big thing for us. You allowed us to celebrate our marriage in a way we never thought we would be able to and to do something truly unique. We hope that whatever we can do, will be enough to repay you however our gratitude towards you all will be forever!

Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren: I know that your day did not end the way you had expected, that you did not think you would be taking photos at our wedding that day, but thank you for being there and giving us some truly memorable and beautiful photos. I know that we joked that you started the day working a piece for USA Today, but then you “crashed our wedding” and we hope that you had a blast doing it!

My friends everywhere: We are sorry you could not join us at the wedding, It was a big day and I would have loved to have everyone I know there. But at what point do we draw the line? We wished we could have fit everyone inside the 747, or to stream it live to the web, but we wanted a small, intimate wedding. We will celebrate our marriage in the new year both here in Seattle and in Australia and we will invite you to attend that celebration, so you too can celebrate our marriage. I hope that the videos and photos will suffice for the moment.

To everyone who gave us gifts: Both Heidi & I thank you for the lovely gifts that you have all given us. You will all get cards and individual thank you’s but we do love everything we have received. Some of the gifts are being put towards things around our apartment, while others are being put towards our honeymoon, where during our experiences on that trip, we will remember you in that moment.

I know that I have so many people I could thank but my brain is not all that great and you know I am forgetful. I can truly say that I married the most amazing woman in my life. As I looked Heidi in the eyes in the plane and said I do, I know that I married the right person, the one that I love and that I did in fact tick something off my bucket list that day. Not only did I start a family with the woman I love, but I also kissed the most beautiful woman alive…

Heidi… I love you.

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With the wedding fast approaching and the cake plans fully covered, we had just small bits and pieces till the wedding itself. The main thing was that Heidi was going to keep the tradition of not seeing me till the wedding from the night before. I wasn’t all that happy about it, since my friends were working pretty much the day off and the day before, so I settled in to an night alone on the couch. My last night as a legally single man, spent on the couch, watching tv, with Heidi’s teddy bear Bigfoot for company (yeah I am sure you have seen a few photos of the culprit floating around). Thrilling!

Wedding morning rolls around and I spend the morning taking a run around the streets to clear my head. A quick oatmeal breakfast and it was time to get the cake transported. I barely had time to breat with that done to head over to a friends place to iron my shirt (since we don’t have an iron) and then by the time that was finished I had under 90 minutes before I had to get some flowers, head home and get ready for the wedding and be out of the house. Heidi wanted to use our apartment as the staging ground for getting ready, fine with me but traffic on the 405 and a failed attempt at getting some flowers meant I had to rush to get ready 🙁

I made it out of the house by the assigned time and headed over to the Museum of flight. I was able to calm myself down by meeting the designer of the 747 and the Boeing Chief Pilot who were there to give a talk on 747 day. Unfortunately they wouldn’t have been able to be present for the wedding (how amazing would it be to have the designer of the 747, sign my wedding certificate as a Witness!), but just getting a chance to meet them was truly an honor.

I was able to take that time to shock a few friends who didn’t know about the wedding as here I was at the Museum in full suit & tie. Truly loved shocking people with the whole “I’m getting married in the first 747”, lots of fun! After the talk it was only a short time before Heidi arrived and we were off to get our photos taken. We wanted to do our photos before the ceremony due to light. The moment I saw Heidi, I was gobsmacked…. I had never seen her look so beautiful in my life. I wanted to take in that moment forever! With the wedding photos about to get started, I had not expected someone else to show up but an Aviation Journalist colleague of mine, Jeremy turned up. It was a shock to him as I said to him “What are you doing here” “Shooting a wedding for USA Today” “O, I guess that’s my wedding you’re shooting!”

We spent the next while getting photos taken all over the museum, with planes, with statues, goofy, serious, everything you would expect. We slowly and progressively moved our way from one side of the museum to the plane itself. The museum shut at 5pm and once that was done, we had free reign of everything in the Air Park and RA001 for an hour. We had a blast getting some photos, but there was serious business. We got set up on the main deck, in the nose of the aircraft and the ceremony began once Heidi and worked her way up the stairs:

The wedding went off greatly, we read our vows (which we had written obviously) from Safety cards (we couldn’t find any 747 ones, so went with what we had, two Southwest 737 cards) and we signed our marriage certificate on the original design model of the 747. After some more photos of everyone and our first as a married couple, we headed away from the museum to Dinner at a restaurant in Columbia City. Nothing huge just a small family style dinner to celebrate the day. Cake was had, food was consumed (which for Me & Heidi was some of the first that day) and much fun was conducted. Heidi & I finished our wedding night off by walking across the street for ice cream at Full Tilt, because nothing says the end of our day like Ice Cream.

Getting Married in a 747

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One of the things that I decided with our wedding was to continue a tradition (well kind of) that my father did when he got married. Some of you know that my father cooks a lot. One of his most known food items, is “the cake”. He makes the best fruit cake (or as some people call it, rum cake). When he got engaged he had made his usual cake and had transported it to Sydney where he was visiting my mother. When they got engaged, they decided to keep that piece of fruit cake and use it as the Top tier of their wedding cake. So what did I do with our cake? Rather than make one tier… how about the whole cake! It would save us money, we could have EXACTLY what we wanted and I could be happy with what we achieved.

We wanted at least 2 tiers, but wanted to have a cake that we could freeze the top tier (per that tradition) till our first anniversary. So that meant a multiple tier cake. I wasn’t sure if an 8″ cake and a 6″ cake would be enough, so we ended up with 3 tiers, just to make sure we had enough cake. We were only having a small “reception” (more on that in the next installment) but I wanted to make sure everyone had some cake, and some to take home as well. It may have caused many, many “discussions” with Heidi, but in the end we both were happy.

The cake was decided on a Lemon Buttermilk cake (we found the recipe online actually) and with a filling of Lemon Curd. The frosting was the part that we always went backwards and forwards over. Unfortunately Heidi doesn’t like fondant, so it meant that we had to have a soft frosted cake. I wanted to make sure I had a frosting that wasn’t to heavy with the cake, but Heidi wanted full buttercream, something that could be quite heavy.

We tested it several times over to find the right one. In the end with the wedding cake, there was a total of 10 cakes made…. that’s right, 10 sponges. 2 double layer test cakes (so that is 4 cakes right there) plus the actual cake itself. It was a lot of cake! Each cake had almost a half dozen eggs, so much flour, butter, sugar. O lordy just thinking about it scares me!

But let’s look at some of the pictures:

From Life in Seattle 2014
From Life in Seattle 2014

That’s what my kitchen looked like after the first set of 8 sponges being made that day!

From Life in Seattle 2014

Thankfully I have a nice high powered stand mixer!

From Life in Seattle 2014

8 Sponges, 6 for the wedding cake and 2 for the final test cake

From Life in Seattle 2014

The Final test cake, testing 2 different kinds of frosting, mere days before the wedding

From Life in Seattle 2014

Starting assembly

From Life in Seattle 2014

First Tier Complete

From Life in Seattle 2014

Lots of Frosting!

From Life in Seattle 2014

2nd tier ready to go up

From Life in Seattle 2014

Starting the frosting process

From Life in Seattle 2014

Final Tier Up

From Life in Seattle 2014

The Final Cake!

So the day of the wedding came around, I had already spent two full days stressing over the cake (don’t even start me on almost covering the kitchen in frosting due to the mixer almost overflowing with Swiss Meringue Frosting) and I had one last thing to do. I had hoped that it would be an easy day, just drive the cake from Renton to Columbia City to the restaurant and it would all be ok…. Nope! I got the cake ready to travel and since I spent the night alone (again, more in the next piece) I had to get it over to the restaurant alone and as easily as possible.

From Life in Seattle 2014

It rained unfortunately that morning so here I am stressing to make sure the cake has no marks, or any problems while I transport it down 4 floors to the car park, then on wet, crappy Seattle roads drive it across town. Joy of Joys! I had barely gotten the cake into the car when this:

From Life in Seattle 2014

The seatbelt slipped out of my hands and caught the top of the cake. I was swearing, cussing, all kinds of bad things, but thankfully I still had frosting and had it in a container in the freezer. I ran upstairs and grabbed it, along with a pallette knife and off to the restaurant. Once I got there I fixed it, and I also left the extra frosting there, just in case. In the end I did have to make a few touch ups to the cake right when they bought the cake out of the kitchen as unfortunately the staff didn’t treat it that kindly.

But the cake was a success, everyone liked it and it was a good choice. We still have the top tier in our freezer and it will sit there for a solid year. I don’t regret making the cake, but to anyone contemplating making a wedding cake…. DON’T DO IT!