Posted by David McRee at BlogTheBeach.com
After the wedding ceremony on Sanibel Island.
After our wedding ceremony on the beach on Sanibel Island I asked the photographer to snap a few photos with my camera so we’d have a few to share without waiting for the professional photos.
Now it's official: David and Sue McRee.
The ceremony went pretty much as planned, with one minor, but significant hitch: sand flies (aka no-see-ums, properly referred to as “biting midges“). They came out in force right at sunset and made the ceremony and photo session quick. We are trying hard to laugh about it, but it pretty much disrupted the ceremony even though we were covered with bug spray.
I’ve been to Sanibel many times and have never been attacked by sand flies like that before. A word of advice to anyone planning a sunset beach wedding. Inquire about sand flies. Try to arrive the day before and go out on the beach around 3 or 4 pm and hang out until sunset to see if there are any of those nasty biting creatures. If there are, consider moving your ceremony to an earlier hour and plan to be off the beach by 4:30 p.m. If there is a steady breeze, especially a breeze off the water, the flies should not be a problem. We had no such breeze. Sand flies should not be a problem in cooler weather.
Dinner at the Thistle Lodge at the Casa Ybel Resort, which was practically next door to our condo.
Our dinner at the Thistle Lodge. Hibachi style salmon and Macadamia-encrusted mahi-mahi.
The evening took a turn for the better after we showered away the bug spray and treated the bug bites with hydrocortisone. We went to the Thistle Lodge for dinner and had a wonderful time. There were very few people in the restaurant this time of year so it was a quiet evening. Service and the food were excellent. We had planned an after-dinner trip to Ellington’s, another nearby restaurant with live jazz, but we were too tired and decided to leave it for another night.
