Jessica + Mike – Adventurous Hvar Wedding

It was a hot summer day in Croatia when Mike and Jessica contacted us regarding their wedding in Croatia, more specifically their Hvar wedding. We love the sound our phones make when we get a new email. Sometimes it’s Eric Jones trying to sell us whatever he sells (read: spam) but this time the mail signal sounded like a new adventure. And what an adventure this was!

Through this post, we’ll write not only about the Hvar wedding of Mike and Jessica but also about our approach to making everyone’s wedding a pleasant mix of love and adventure. To clarify, we talk about small and intimate weddings that usually include just 2 people. We normally call this kind of wedding – elopements. And we are also Croatia adventure wedding specialists. Adventure is what we do and live throughout the year.

We believe that Croatia is perfect for these kinds of elopements and weddings and that’s one of the reasons we started with these ‘different’ elopement and wedding packages that we offer today.

‘Andrea and Mario are wonderful adventure guides and professional photographers. They did everything we hoped for and much more than we imagined. Very professional all around. We exchanged a few emails and spoke once to share ideas for our ceremony and outdoor excursions. They sent us a few reasonably priced options, we selected one and continued to refine it over WhatsApp. Communication was fast and pleasant. On the day of our ceremony in Hvar they met us at our hotel and took us to a beautiful spot for our ceremony. Then we spent two beautiful half-days kayaking around the islands, beaches, and caves of Hvar. They sent a couple of ceremony photos right away. Two weeks later we received 70 wonderful pictures of our ceremony and more from kayaking. Their website is very accurate. They are truly nice people to be with and are real masters of both photography and outdoor guiding. It was like being with friends who do all the planning and hard work for you. We would recommend them to everyone who has a sense of adventure and appreciates exquisite photography.‘

Mike and Jessica

First contact

If you visit our page containing the contact form, you’ll notice that we ask you a few questions there. It might seem like a lot to write, but it really helps us a lot to imagine what kind of wedding you like. Just to make it perfect, remember?

At first, Mike and Jessica weren’t sure where they would like to have their wedding in Croatia. In their first mail to us, they have written they would like to have a wedding near the sea, but also they wanted us to organize 2 days of adventure for them. Exactly what we like to do. We do a lot of different kinds of adventures, but when someone hires us both as photographers and adventure guides, that’s when we feel like winning a lottery ticket.

So after the initial mail, all we knew is that they want their wedding in Croatia, somewhere by the sea and they want extra adventure added as a spice to the main dish.

Now it’s time when we move to the next step.

Connecting names with the faces

That’s right, a video call. Something that makes photographer-client bond much stronger. We, people, are visual beings and we feel much safer when knowing who’s on the other side. That’s why we always encourage couples to have a video call with us. And suddenly everybody feels much more comfortable.

During the video call with Mike and Jessica, we found out that they were easy-going people, we talked a bit further about wishes regarding their special day and now things were much clearer to us. You would be surprised how much you can find out about a person only from one video call.

At this moment we knew that the Hvar wedding is one of the options, but there were still more cards on the table. Read further.

Designing a guide just for you

This is cool as it sounds. As soon as somebody contacts us with any kind of wishes we already have some places in our mind so we write them down. After the video call and a few more emails we start to filter the locations, add some new ones, we start to play and combine…

Croatia is full of beautiful places and our job is to find one that best suits your wishes and needs. Remote beaches make a perfect backdrop but if you say to us that you don’t want to walk for a long time they are out of the equation. We need to find something else.

It’s a process that takes some time and thinking, but it’s the process we mastered in the past few years. After all the calculations are done and we found the best places for you, we design a guide with a few possible places. That guide includes images and descriptions of different locations that fit in your wishlist. Wedding in Hvar was one of the options for Mike and Jessica and they choose this beautiful island as the location for their wedding and adventures.

About Hvar island

Hvar island is one of Croatia’s most popular islands and, believe us, Croatia has a lot of them. Islands, we mean, but not many of them can compare with the island of Hvar. This gorgeous part of land surrounded by sea is situated in southern Croatia, across what’s known as Makarska Riviera.

The whole of Hvar island is beautiful and a good thing is that it’s pretty close to land. You need only half an hour of a ferry ride to reach it. The most popular places on the island are situated in its northern part with the city of Hvar and Stari Grad being one of the main attractions of Hvar island. When speaking about inhabited places.

When it comes to nature, Hvar island has a lot to offer. And nature was just what we needed when designing Hvar’s wedding day for Mike and Jessica. We had to be smart, have a wedding in a beautiful place, and embark on to equally mesmerizing adventure.

The wedding & adventure day

We came to Hvar island the day before M&J’s Hvar wedding. We took the ferry from Drvenik to Sućuraj and drove through the Hvar for 2 hours before reaching our destination which was the city of Hvar. Mike and Jessica were also staying there and we were supposed to pick them up tomorrow morning and take them to their Hvar wedding location. They chose to have a simple symbolic wedding, say their vows to each other, and then embark on the adventure we prepared for them.

And so it was, we came early in the morning in front of their hotel, they arrived, we met, sat in the van, turned on the engine, and sh*%&$#. Strange noises. Strange noises from the engine are never good. Why now? Why at the moment when we have 2 people ready to be married? But that’s life. So we opened the hood of our van and since we are not mechanics we could only cry. But we do have a friend who is a mechanic and with a few exchanged pictures and describing the sound we managed to find out the problem. And, in the end, we managed to repair our van and continue with the plan.

Mike and Jessica had their Hvar wedding in Sv. Nedelja (St. Sunday) near one of the characteristic landscapes of Hvar island. We decided this to be the best option because of the beautiful cliffs and sea that were our backdrop during the photo shoot. Exchanging the vows didn’t last for long and we were swiftly moving from one vantage point to another to capture the overall mood the best way we can.

After their Hvar wedding, it was time for the adventure. There are many adventures you can organize on Hvar island, but in the summer months, kayaking is one of the best possible options. Sv. Nedelja, where they had their elopement, is near the Red rocks, a famous attraction of Hvar island that is reachable only by the sea. And so, while Mike and Jessica were having their lunch in a nearby restaurant/winery (also a very famous place – Bilo Idro), we were inflating the kayaks and preparing the equipment for our adventure.

We started with kayaking right in front of the restaurant and made a few stops at some of the most beautiful beaches of Hvar island. Finally, when we reached Red rocks, we were the only people there at that particular moment. If you are on Hvar island, go and visit Red rocks, you’ll find nowhere as clear sea as it is over there.

Only the adventure day

Now that their Hvar wedding was over, Mike and Jessica still had one more adventure to do before we say goodbye to each other. The second day was reserved for Paklinski islands, the island group opposite the city of Hvar.

Kayaks were again the best possible option for the exploration of these peculiar islands. All the equipment was ready before Mike and Jessica arrived. And so we embarked early in the morning from Hvar and reached the islands some 40 minutes later.

Kayaking on a crystal clear sea and enjoying the Paklinski islands is an experience in itself. We explored a lot, we stopped a few times at some of the most popular places and had swimming breaks.

Final words and goodbye

And with the return from Paklinski islands ended this Hvar wedding adventure. We felt like friends after 2 days of mutual adventures, and below this text, you can read how was Mike and Jessica’s experience with us.

If you are considering having a wedding in Croatia then you might consider Hvar wedding too. If you decide to have the wedding on this beautiful island, then make sure you explore all it has to offer.