Travel Wedding Centerpieces

When the Mister and I got hitched in May 2008, I spent nearly a year and a half planning the perfect day that would be fun and elegant while also incorporating our love for travel. Most internet searches for “travel themed wedding” brought up pages on destination weddings in tropical places. Massachusetts is our home (although a destination for many of our guests) and definitely not tropical in May or any other time of year.

So tropical was out, and I didn’t want something painfully obvious like this:

Here are five tips for planning a wedding that will incorporate your love of travel without going over the top.

1. Find small ways to incorporate your heritage
I’ve got a little Irish in me from my grandparents, but my in-laws really are Irish – as in born and raised there. I chose a few Celtic songs to be played at the ceremony, and selected a Celtic font for our monogram to use on all of the stationery.

Our wedding programs incorporated the monogram as well as a luggage tag embellishment.

2. Give your guests a destination:
Name your tables after places you’ve been. This is a rather obvious suggestion, but there are different ways of presenting it.

• Cities or countries you’ve traveled to
• Your favorite hotels
• Museums or other sight-seeing stops

I went with cities that we’ve been to, either together or on our own, and created tent cards with the city names as well as “postcards” for each table. I made the postcards using photos from our trips and ordered them through Shutterfly with a border that allowed me to print the location directly on the photo. For the back of the card, I used cardstock and wrote a message addressed to our guests that described when we went and what we did at that destination. It was a nice conversation starter.

My friend had a lovely Parisian themed wedding this summer. She ordered antique postcards of the city on eBay and mounted them on cardstock:

Her theme (and mine) extended to the place cards. M. mounted hers in wine corks and added a very French fleur de lis for flair:

I modeled mine after luggage tags by creating a template in PowerPoint and Word and printed them onto card stock, then punched a hole at the top and added coordinating ribbon.

There are loads of other ways to incorporate your favorite destinations into your wedding, like tulips in your bouquet to represent Turkey and Holland or South African wine on the table, but this post is long enough!