Anniversary photo shoot

On 2/14/03 we eloped, just the two of us, in a tiny town in North Carolina where Brian was stationed, after only dating for 6 months and being engaged for 6 weeks- because the war had just kicked off and Brian was headed out on an indefinite deployment.

On 11/8/03 Brian was home safe & sound and we had the wedding we’d previously hoped for, in that same tiny NC town, surrounded by our 60 closest family & friends.

Because we paid for our wedding ourselves, we cut costs by not having a professional photographer and instead had a coworker, who owned a decent camera, take our photos.

Twenty years later, that is still a huge regret for us both because she did a terrible job. We have only a handful of decent photos and even those are grainy, abstract and low quality.

Fast forward to 2022 when the Air Force agrees to send us our winter clothing in US storage because we are leaving the year round tropical Indonesian weather and headed to a few bitter winters in South Korea.

On delivery day, boy am I surprised to find that they sent me no winter footwear, but instead my wedding dress. Sigh.

So I get an idea- let’s use that wedding dress next year for a 20th anniversary photo shoot with me the same dress and Brian in the same uniform.

And we did it! It was a fun early morning last weekend when we snuck out of the house all dolled up together, while neighbors were looking on while out walking their dogs, and we headed to our photo shoot with ALL the other Korean photographers, who wanted to capture the fall foliage! So many of them congrats, as if we’d just gotten married.

20 years later, we finally have some precious, and honestly priceless, photos. And we still have each other!

We decided to do our photo shoot on an aspen tree lined street along the river about 20 minutes from our house. We got so lucky that the foliage cooperated with our anniversary photo shoot! We got there at 8am, and so did everyone else. We were photographed ALOT- Brian in his uniform, me in a wedding dress, and our being caucasian made everyone want to snap a picture. At one point there were about 10 people (some actual photographers with big lens' and others just using their smartphones, standing behind our photographer, all taking pics of us. I guess this is what it feels like to be a celebrity and have paparazzi around taking pics!

It was a cool, crisp Saturday morning and I LOVE how the pictures turned out!

Almost ready-

No limo for me. Also no make-up artist!

Brian snapped this as we awkwardly waited for our photographer-

And the real ones-

On our actual anniversary, he worked. I ran errands. We took the city bus to a cheap ramen shop and hit up the Korean $1 store for our date night tonight. Then we came home to a house full of teenagers, our favorite pajamas and a new tv show. TOGETHER! This is us and I would not change a thing. I never could have dreamed it’d be this lovely 20 years later.