Wedding Tales: Maui shore the stu of dreams
A perfect day on the beach
Every bride talks about the magic of her wedding day, but few can say they were feted by a school of dolphins.
On the morning she married her fiancé Noel Broughton this summer, Christine Stawnych sipped champagne with her bridesmaids on the patio of her hotel room overlooking the Pacific Ocean, eyes closed, face raised to the warmth of a Hawaiian sunrise.
And that’s when an already perfect day became something extraordinary, and totally unexpected.
“We were sitting 20 feet from where the wedding was going to be held later that day,” says Christine, 28, “and all of a sudden a school of dolphins appeared out of nowhere, practically right in front of us. There were about 60 of them; little ones, big ones. They were so beautiful. They played for about 15 minutes; jumping, playing and spinning in the water. Honestly, it was amazing; it was like they were putting on a show just for us.”
The day she became engaged to the man she loved 18 months earlier, while no less magical, was decidedly chillier, nearly frozen, in fact.
By then, they had been together for a couple of years, and had decided to build a house together. Christine’s father owned a construction company, and she was sitting in the cab of an excavator, ready to break ground for work to get underway, when Noel shouted a warning that caused her to stop mid-shovel.
“Watch out for that rock!” he yelled.
“What rock?” she asked, turning to face him.
And that’s when Noel dropped to his knee, reaching into the pocket of his jeans for the box that held the ring. The whole thing was captured on video by the couple’s family members, all of whom were in attendance that day to celebrate what Christine had been told was an official groundbreaking ceremony, but was really an engagement party.
Needless to say, she said “yes.” She was impressed, too, something Noel had striven to do almost from the moment he met her.
She was beautiful, of course, but she was also fiercely independent and goal-driven, qualities he found incredibly attractive.
They met the summer he worked for her father’s construction company, when they were both attending university; she for education, he for engineering. She wasn’t interested, though, not because he wasn’t suitably charming and handsome, but because she wasn’t interested in dating, period.
“I thought he was really nice, but I wasn’t looking for anyone then,” says Christine. “I was really into riding then so I was out at Spruce Meadows quite a bit that summer. I didn’t have time to see anybody.”
He finally managed to get her attention later that fall, and one of their first dates she talked about her passion for show jumping.
“If you’re allergic to horses,” she told him, laughing, “we might as well stop seeing each other right now.”
He laughed, too, insisted he wasn’t. He was lying, though, something she discovered when he went with her to Vancouver for a horse show a few months later.
“He ended up taking Benadryl all the time we were there,” she says. “I kept asking him how he was and he kept saying ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ but he wasn’t. He was wheezing all the time. I almost killed him.”
She still rides, of course, and he gets shots for his allergies. Horses notwithstanding, their common interests are many, chief among them a love of family, and of travel.
Most of his family is from Texas — his mother lives in Midland — and when they planned their wedding they discovered it was cheaper for them to travel to Hawaii than Edmonton, making the location a slam-dunk. Altogether, a total of 44 guests attended the wedding, including the bride’s 80-yearold grandmother.
The ceremony took place at the Sheraton Maui, on a lawn overlooking the ocean on a cliffside at sunset.
Instead of the traditional wedding cake, they went with a build-your-own sundae bar, offering guests four different flavours of ice cream and all the toppings imaginable.
“That’s been my favourite thing since I was 12 years old,” laughs Christine.
They hired a ukulele band for the reception, which put its own spin on modern hits like Daft Punk’s Get Lucky.
“We all danced the night away,” says Christine. “It was so much fun.”
The next day a rare tropical storm rolled through the island, but not before the couple went for a morning snorkel.
The rest of the week was spent scuba-diving with friends and family, and mountain-biking down volcanoes.
“What I enjoyed most about our wedding day was being able to spend time with my new wife and sharing this moment with all of our close friends and family,” says Noel. “Seeing her eyes light up walking down the aisle and the biggest smile on her face is something I’ll remember forever.”