Name Changes

Going on Honeymoon with Your Married Name

Right, so I went on the .gov.uk website and have the official government information!

The website address for that site is www.direct.gov.uk. If you’re like me and renewing a passport that’s already run out, the process is somewhat easier.

And there is some more information on this page.

Firstly, you will need forms: PD1 and PD2. PD1 is the information leaflet which tells you all about the process, and PD2 is the extra name change form you need to include with your normal passport application.

So, basically, when you apply for your passport renewal, you send off the name changing form with your normal form and then your passport will become valid on the same date as your ceremony.

To renew an adult ten-year 32-page passport costs:

• £77.50 for the standard service

• £112.50 for the one-week Fast Track Service

• £129.50 for the one-day Premium service

IPS (Identity and Passport Services) can prepare a first passport in your married name any time up to three months before the wedding. But the passport is 'postdated'. This means you cannot use it before the day of the ceremony. Some countries will not issue visas for postdated passports. You should check with the consulate of the country concerned.

If you are going to a country that requires a visa in advance, instead of just the stamp in your passport, like China or Vietnam, I wouldn’t bother changing your name on your passport. The name on the visa and the passport will have to match else they won’t always let you in, even with your marriage certificate. It’s best not to risk it.

My wedding location just has a stamp in the passport as a visa, like Hong Kong, USA and Europe, so I’m not too worried about having my married name in my passport.

Contact your travel agent or the consulate of the country you’re visiting to check if you need a visa to visit. Or google. I googled. (When did Google become a verb?)

There is a lot of good information on the internet already, as a lot of people are asking the same questions. To be sure, however, it’s best to check with the country you’re visiting.

I can’t wait to get my passport with a new name in it! How exciting is that?!

Honeymoon!

We’ve Booked Our Honeymoon!!

Days to go: 312

I am so excited!! We have booked it, paid the deposit and now we’re pending paying the rest of it!

I am so so excited! I’ve been hop skipping and jumping all the way home! And h2b has been grinning too! We booked the holiday using my married name too! That was exciting in itself!

We will be going on a cruise! We wanted to see lots of different places and have a lot of different things to do, we thought a cruise would be the best way.

After speaking to the travel agent, we looked up the reviews of the trip on trip advisor and other review websites and they all said the holiday is fantastic! They talked about balloon rides and camel rides, h2b was hooked!

I am so completely excited! This honeymoon just makes our marriage even more exciting!

And it was fairly exciting to start with!

I have decided to travel under my married name. I went online and a lot of people have said not to do that. However, my passport has run out anyway and I will need to apply for a new passport regardless. I feel that I may as well get a passport in my married name and then I won’t have to change it later.

We didn’t get travel insurance from the travel agent because we wanted to have a shop around before we were sure which insurance company we went with. They did offer a good rate of £42 for the both of us, which covered illness, loss of luggage and things, and delayed flights. We’re still going to shop around first.

I may not have mentioned this before but I’m so excited!!! Yay!! We’re going on honeymoon!!!

xx xx

Wedding Websites

Narrowed Down Choices

I have been on the search for the perfect wedding website: one that looks good while providing the best information to our guests. My masters degree is in web design so I am a fairly fussy customer when it comes to wedding websites.

I have narrowed down my choices to the following:

Project Wedding.com	My Wedding.com
Big Day Page.com	Getting Married.co.uk
Wedding Announcer.com	Wedding Path.co.uk

You may notice that all these websites are in fact pink. Well, lilac is one of our wedding colours and not many wedding websites are in lilac. That surprises me really because a lot of the suppliers I spoke to told me that lilac was a popular wedding colour.

Choosing a website is a really tough choice as all the different sites offer different designs and functionality.

Wedding Announcer.com

Why I’d Choose Wedding Announcer.com

Wedding Announcer is a very simple website which makes it marginally easier to use for people who aren’t web savvy.

The behind the scenes part of the website has clear boxes for information to be entered into and there’s not much fuss.

Why I Wouldn’t Choose Wedding Announcer.com

The designs could be considered slightly dated, there’s no option to add links or maps from googlemaps or other sites, and I’m not too keen on the designs.

While ease of use is important, it shouldn’t detract from the over all functionality of the site. It has to work as a website that provides information to your guests.

Getting Married.co.uk

Why I’d Choose Getting Married.co.uk

If you are web savvy, the coding options on Getting Married.co.uk are fantastic. You can insert html and insert pictures or maps from sources like googlemaps. You can add as many new pages as you want and rename them to the titles of your choice.

If you’re not web savvy, you can still use the site as it works perfectly well as a simple site. It just has the option to include the more advanced features to those who know how to use them.

You edit the site in the site, as it were, so you can see exactly how your changes will look. The yellow highlighted text in this picture shows the editable text on the page.

Why I Wouldn’t Choose Getting Married.co.uk

I really don’t like the designs. I’m after a balance between the functions and the design. Getting Married.co.uk have a lot of different website designs, but to me I feel they are a bit dated and not really as sleek as some of the designs out there. Which is a shame because they have some good ideas tech side.

Big Day Page.com

Why I’d Choose Big Day Page.com

It’s very simple, not easy to break and very straight forward. For those out there who aren’t sure about websites or editing, this is the website for you!

Why I Wouldn’t Choose Big Day Page.com

There’s no room for making the page unique, no adding extra pages that suit you and your guests. It’s too uniform, and to be honest, I’m not too keen on the website designs.

My Top Three

I’m going to have to find some way to choose between theses three websites (in no particular order):

Project Wedding.com

Why I’d Choose Project Wedding.com 

Project Wedding.com has the option of using a html editor so that if you want to embed items such as a map or a video from you tube, these things are possible.

The designs are quite nice, not completely to my taste but they are nice. You can add and delete pages and change the names of the template pages. It seems as if you can have as many pages as you’d like.

It is perfectly possible to remove any of the preset items added into the website, or rename them as you see fit.

It’s a straight forward website for those who are not tech savvy, it has the option of adding extras for those of us who know how and the designs are fairly nice.

Why I Wouldn’t Choose Project Wedding.com

For me, it’s just the designs that would prevent me from using Project Wedding.com. They are nice, but maybe there are better.

Wedding Path.co.uk

Why I’d Choose Wedding Path.co.uk

It’s British! Not always the best reason for choosing something, but there none the less. I think you have to be invited to have a website with Wedding Path now, however I’m sure that’s just done by sending them an email or registering. I set up my website almost straight after we got engaged (October 2009) so I had one before the ‘invitedness’ started.

I like the designs on Wedding Path.co.uk. They have animated headers and nice bright colours. Again, the number of designs is limited but the ones they have are nice, up to date and modern.

Again, like Project Wedding.com it’s possible to insert html, which is always useful.

Why I Wouldn’t Choose Wedding Path.co.uk

It’s a little trickier than with Project Wedding.com because it doesn’t have an embedded html editor, you actually have to type all the code yourself. But again, if you’re not into editing code, you wouldn’t use that anyway.

My Wedding.com

Why I’d Choose My Wedding.com

I did like the majority of the designs. They have a fairly cool scheme called ‘Spring Wedding’ but it’s in green and blue and my wedding is lilac and pink so it doesn’t really fit with all the stationary.

The behind the scenes part of the website is absolutely fool proof, step by step, so easy even my mum could use it! You can edit the names of the pages, change the order they appear on the menu and turn off or on certain pages.

There are 6 custom pages, pages you can change and edit yourself to make how you want. There are also a number of template pages that are set up for you, like a photo gallery, wedding party details, RSVP and things for your guests to do in your area.

Why I Wouldn’t Choose My Wedding.com

Embedding html in a page is important for me; I don’t just want the links to a map, I want to include the map with directions in the webpage. As far as I can tell, it’s not possible to add html to the pages at My Wedding.com.

If I Were You..

For the Web Savvy

I would go with Wedding Path.co.uk or Project Wedding. I have looked at the website designs  on both sites and just chosen the one that fits most with our wedding and uses the same colours. Both of these websites also supply wedding stationary that matches the website, so you could have it all coordinated and looking lovely if you wanted.

For the Web Surfers

I would choose My Wedding.com. They have lovely designs and a very easy method for entering your information.

Good luck!

Invitations

News About the Invitations!

We have received the dates for the invitations!

We should be getting our first invitation proof to check and see if we like it by late June (which is only a few weeks away now!!!!) and we’ll get the final order by mid-July.

I know a lot of people won’t agree with this but I was thinking of sending out some of the invitations fairly early as we have a significant number of guests who will need to buy flights to get to our wedding.

I’m not sure. If you send them out too early will they get lost? We won’t be able to send out extra invites if they do get lost, but I am working on us having a wedding website which will have all the details on it.

Anyway, I’m excited about getting the invitations. It’ll make the wedding seem a whole lot more real. Actually, with only 10 months, 8 days (and as I write this, 23 hours and 31 minutes) to go it’s seeming fairly real now. H2b is getting really involved and excited in his own way, too.

We are actually struggling over the guest list. With only 108 places and two very large families, it’s really difficult. In a dream world, I’d have booked a venue with a massive space and invite everyone we know! Unfortunately, we are limited by both space and money.

We just don’t want to offend anyone.

But in general, I feel people are understanding and are aware of the outrageous costs weddings entail. For example, I just spent an astronomical amount on a wedding dress that I will wear for one day, but I’m quibbling over 50 quid for a new laptop I will probably use every day for years! It’s almost as if, if it’s for the wedding then it’s ok to spend that amount of money.

But, even so, I am loving every moment of planning the most wonderful day of my life!

English Wedding

Blogger Bride

Please don’t forget to check out my posts on English Wedding! I try not to write the same things on English Wedding as I do on here.

I’ve written three posts so far, but with not being at work this week I may have time to write some more!

My posts so far are:

- My Story So Far

- Days to go: 321

- Days to go: 314

I’m going to keep updating English Wedding with different posts so please remember to check out both websites!

Honeymoon

Planning our Honeymoon!

Today, we went to Thomas Cook to talk about our honeymoon!!!

I am so completely excited! H2b and I haven’t been on holiday for years, except a few weekends staying in the UK, so I am really looking forward to this.

But it is a difficult choice! The location of your honeymoon, the duration of stay, the activities you do: there are so many choices it’s difficult to know which is the right one.

To help us, we made a list of our honeymoon requirements, what we both want for our honeymoon.

My Wants	H2b Wants
1. Lots of things to do and see 2. Warm sunny weather 3. Old things to visit, like ancient things 4. Relaxing fun activities 5. Clean, nice hotel 6. Something we’ll remember for the rest of our lives as a fantastic holiday 7. Good views	1. Beach walks 2. Spa 3. Active night life 4. Views 5. Cultural things 6. Historical things to learn about 7. A variety of activities such as   - snorkelling   - diving   - motorised water sports

With these ideas in mind, we headed to Thomas Cook.  H2b wanted to try Thomas Cook as he’d had recommendations from colleagues. I watch Watchdog, like a lot of British people, and it seems as if most of the British holiday companies have featured on it from time to time, but we wanted to give Thomas Cook a try regardless.

The lady at Thomas Cook was actually really helpful. Unfortunately, we weren’t. We had no idea where we wanted to go and no idea of what we really wanted.

We knew we wanted all inclusive.

The last thing we wanted to worry about on our honeymoon was where we’d go to eat. There were a number of places that we could go to which offered an all inclusive package. One I liked was a cruise, we could travel around different places and see lots of amazing things. I wouldn’t be able to go to one place and lie around. I’m someone who likes lots of things to do.

I’d probably blog about it if I was stuck doing nothing.

Luckily, h2b likes taking photos of lots of different things so we will be out doing things.

Well, in the end I think we did settle on an interesting honeymoon (although not sure about booking!). Something that will both be relaxing but with lots of activities to keep us entertained. We chose something that would be all inclusive so that all we had to think about is having a good time! We’re seeing as much as we can of the area and learning about the culture.

An experience that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.