We’ve got another guest post here at Beers and Beans and I have to say I was pretty psyched when I read this one. It’s hysterical! I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

Jack Jones is a freelance travel writer who has traveled extensively throughout Australia, Asia and Europe. His biggest adventure to date has been to traverse the vast and lonely emptiness of Australia’s outback (surviving Wolf Creek in the process) in an epic 10,000 mile road trip.

Here it comes again folks – rearing its big, red, heart-shaped head, peering eagerly over the commercial horizon and like a rising sun splashing shop windows with a rosy hue. It’s grinning gleefully at couples and winking suggestively at singles. It’s creating warm, fuzzy feelings of anticipation in women and flutters of severe anxiety in men.

Romantics prize it, cynics despise it, neutrals internalize it. But whatever your opinion on the soppy extravaganza we call Valentine’s Day, one thing is certain: there is no avoiding it.

Not for me at any rate, because all this (unnaturally forced) love in the air has got me thinking. About weddings to be specific. As an avid traveler and a bit of a reluctant romantic myself, it occurred to me how great it would be to combine the ultimate love of my life with…um…my future wife, by traveling to some exotic location and blurting “I do!”.

So after digging into my traveling memory bank, I’ve come up with three amazing places in the world to tie the knot. Now all that’s left to do is find a nice partner who can put up with terrible jokes till death do us part, to find an exceptionally well paid job and to convince my family and friends to buy a plane ticket. And a hotel room. And lots of presents. If you’ve already achieved all those things, this might be just what you’re looking for…

The London Eye, England

Arguably the greatest city in the world, London would be a wonderful place to get married regardless of location, but to do it on the London Eye – the gigantic ferris wheel on the banks of the River Thames in the heart of Westminster – would be nothing short of incredible. A typical package would see you go round twice – the first rotation for the ceremony, the second for photos and champagne and the like– over the space of an hour in a private capsule festooned with flowers.

Vows are exchanged at the top of the wheel, where the soaring views are at their most magnificent: the lethargic river meandering through a jumbled mix of ancient cathedrals and futuristic skyscrapers; red buses and black cabs zooming about like self-sufficient toys; the Gothic spires of the Houses of Parliament moodily etched into the wintery sky. Good place to get a sense of direction, too.

Knysna Elephant Park, South Africa

Everyone realizes with slight dismay at some point in their lives that to say they adore elephants does nothing to assert their individualism. For the amount of debate it provokes we might as well announce that we like music, or enjoy eating nice food. Still, we carry on adoring them regardless – especially those baby ones who stumble along at the back of the herd *awww!* – so this next suggestion is likely to be well received.

A world away from London but equally unforgettable, the Knysna Elephant Park on South Africa’s Garden Route – the ruggedly beautiful stretch of coast sandwiched between the Tsitsikamma Mountains and the Indian Ocean – specialises in safari-style weddings. Of course, the park’s main focus is providing a sanctuary for the elephants and promoting conservationism, but with their added bonus of catering for your Big Day, you can milk the elephant-themed photographs to your heart’s content. And if she so wishes, the bride can arrive perched atop one of the colossal beasts, and if that doesn’t make her stand out from the crowd…well, anyway.

Any beach in Hawaii

The gentle strums of a ukulele floating on a warm Pacific breeze; a cobalt ocean washing warm waves against white shores flecked with drowsy palms; a lush, green mountainous backdrop of such unutterable grandeur it almost seems otherworldly… This is Hawaii, more of a dreamscape than a landscape.

What I’m getting to, in a roundabout sort of way, is that a Hawaii wedding would be very, very difficult to top. True, it may be the ultimate cliché of alternative weddings, but let’s not forget clichés are there for a reason, and ones such as this are highly excusable. Not cheap, of course, but this would lend the “for richer, for poorer” vow extra relevance, so that can only be a good thing.

And to end on a positive note, if you get jilted there’s always the legendary Hawaii surfing to take your mind off your devastated heart (and bank balance). And if you can’t surf or have an entirely rational fear of sharks, the sunsets are worth a look.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

*1st photo provided by EDF Energy London Eye, 2nd photo provided by Jack, 3rd photo provided by Nariko’s Nest.

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*Please remember all photos on this website are copyrighted and property of BeersandBeans.com, NarikosNest.com & Bethany Salvon. Please do not use them without my permission. If you want to use one of them please contact me to ask first because I do love to share and I would be flattered. Thanks!

The following is a guest post from Emily Starbuck Gerson (above w/ Bryan, her husband to be), a travel junkie and professional writer based in Austin, Texas. Emily is recently engaged, so she is in the process of researching honeymoons. She runs the travel blog Maiden Voyage, and you can follow her on Twitter at @TheMaidenVoyage. Her site is awesome so check it out. Go. Now.

Who actually uses their fine china? Do you really need a gravy boat? Now that I’m engaged and starting to think about where to register, the typical wedding gifts just don’t interest me. That doesn’t mean we don’t want gifts to celebrate our marriage! We just don’t want things we don’t need, especially since we already have too much stuff from combining our two lives. As an avid traveler, one of the things I’m most excited about is the honeymoon. So you can imagine my excitement when I learned about HoneyFund.com, a website that lets you register your honeymoon for free. It’s a great way to receive gift money you can use toward your honeymoon while giving guests the feeling of actually giving you something as opposed to just handing over some cash (or buying you something you don’t need).

Before you use HoneyFund, you do need to have a pretty solid idea of what you want to do for your honeymoon, but if you use it properly, you can earn loads of gift money for your honeymoon. On HoneyFund.com’s website, they show testimonials from couples who used it in the past and received between $3,500 and $6,000 through the site. Granted, you have to have many guests and/or guests with generous budgets to make it possible, but HoneyFund is a great way to officially accept and keep track of gift money for your honeymoon. If you make a wedding website, you can give the link to your HoneyFund registry on there, just like couples do with traditional wedding registries. Once you create a HoneyFund.com account, you can give some details about your wedding. You then create a basic greeting that appears at the top of your registry, where you can welcome guests to the page and thank them for participating. In this blurb, I plan to mention that we appreciate the help making our dream honeymoon a reality, and that we promise to bring home plenty of pictures to share. The free account lets you choose a themed vacation image to go on the page, but your HoneyFund registry page itself will look quite plain and have some Google ads. It’s not unsightly, but it’s a bit bland. They offer an upgrade to their Premium service for $29; this will give you an attractive and detailed registry page design (you pick from several), a photo slideshow of you, professional images of your registry items, and no ads. I’m definitely tempted to upgrade.

Next, you give a brief description of your honeymoon and begin to itemize your trip. List out the basic things you need, or things you think guests will enjoy contributing toward. A romantic dinner on the beach. A couples massage at the spa. An hour on a jet ski. A puddlejumper flight from one island to another. Breakfast in bed. An afternoon of horseback riding. Two nights at a hotel. You outline what you need and how much it costs, and you can add a photo for each item if you want. If you need some inspiration, HoneyFund provides many sample registries (http://www.honeyfund.com/SampleRegistries). While your great aunt may bestow you $500, most wedding guests can probably only give you somewhere between $25 and $100. HoneyFund.com allows you break each item into units, allowing guests with a smaller budget to contribute toward bigger items. Let’s say your plane flights to and from your honeymoon cost $1,000. You would list the item as “Plane flight to Mexico.” You would give the total amount as $1,000, but then you select the quantity and price. For example, you could make it 40 units of $25, or you could make it 20 units of $50, or 10 units of $100. As guests buy up units of it, it displays how many units you still need. Say I go with 10 units of $1,000. If someone buys up two of these units, it will show that I still need eight more. The fact that guests can select which item (or items) they want to donate toward allows them to feel like they know what they’re giving you (even if you end up using that amount of money for something else on the trip). Rather than someone just giving you cash and not knowing what you’ll do with it, your guests get the gratification of knowing that they helped you enjoy something special on your honeymoon.

Another thing that makes it easier is you can select how guests pay you; one option is for them to mail a check to you, in which case you give the site your address so your guests know where to send it. There is also an option to give a check at the wedding, so the guest will just pledge the amount online and then (hopefully!) give you the check at the actual event. Another option is PayPal, which allows your guests to directly give you the money online. The site will give your guests your contact information in case they have any questions. Just like with any other wedding registry, from the homepage, guests can enter your last name to find your registry. Once you start getting gifts, your account will keep track of everything for you; the gift, the giver, the amount, the pledge date, and the payment date, and you can add the thank you date. There’s also a tab for “other gifts,” so you can keep track of other wedding gifts and money on here, too!

I’ve started playing around with our HoneyFund registry and it’s very user-friendly, and I can’t believe it’s free. We haven’t decided on honeymoon plans just yet so I haven’t published it, but I have enjoyed playing around with it. You can go back and edit your details at any time. We will probably have a real registry for tangible things at one place to satisfy the really traditional folks, but we will only have a few basic and truly-needed things, like new towels and silverware. But we plan to make HoneyFund our primary registry—we live together and already have tons of stuff! We would rather have an incredible honeymoon experience, and I love that this service exists to make that easier.

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(All Wedding Photos by Nariko’s Nest Photography (aka: me). If you want more information or want to inquire about having your wedding photographed by Nariko’s Nest please contact me at Beth@NarikosNest.com. BeersandBeans readers get 20% and all destination weddings book at 50% off regular rates!! To see more photos please visit NarikosNest.com)

Did you like this article? If so, consider retweeting or stumbling it. Better yet sign up for our RSS feed OR get the goodies delivered directly to your inbox! Consider yourself hugged.

*Please remember all photos on this website are copyrighted and property of BeersandBeans.com, NarikosNest.com & Bethany Salvon. Please do not use them without my permission. If you want to use one of them please contact me to ask first because I do love to share and I would be flattered. Thanks!

Every love story should be told.

Let Nariko’s Nest tell the story of your wedding day.

I made a new photo site! I’m very excited!! It’s geared mainly towards weddings and travel photos. Please take a look, bookmark it and pass it on to EVERYONE you know.

Take a look see:  Nariko’s Nest

If you know anyone who is getting married please let me know or better yet send them the link. My style is mainly photojournalistic. I still have dates open for 2009 and I’m booking for 2010 now. I can make custom packages for any budget. I’m available on both coasts and of course I would love to shoot destination weddings!

I’m also available for travel work, journalism work, lifestyle portraits, food photography & anything else you can throw my way.

Please tell me what you think of the new site!!!

All comments welcome.

Thanks! Beth

www.NarikosNest.com