My oldest brother Bart got married to Kaya on 10 July! The wedding took place on a Dutch island called Vlieland. It takes almost 2 hours to reach the island by ferry, and you can’t bring your car. The island is quite small, with only one village. Everyone gets around on bikes, and the island has a great holiday atmosphere. There are 5 similar islands (Terschelling is the one “next door”), and Bart and Kaya have spent a lot of their holidays on them. Vlieland is their favourite island, and that’s why they chose to get married there! Perfect choice, also because this was the only island that I hadn’t visited yet 😉

We all stayed in group accommodation which worked out really nicely! Everyone arrived the evening before the wedding, so we all had dinner together and we did some geocaching (a sort of treasure hunt using a gps) in the evening. Below you can see the ladies (plus my dad) team before and after finding the cache 🙂

The next morning (the big day) we woke up to rain. And not just a little bit, no it was POURING. It stayed like that for hours too… Luckily the town hall was only a short walk from our accommodation! I didn’t take any photos of the actual ceremony as there were a lot of people taking pictures already. The first photo below is taken just before we left to the town hall (the groom with his daughter Mare), and the second photo when we walked back – Mare and my mum are having a nice “OOOOO” conversation 😉

We came back to our accommodation to have some cake & champagne!

Mare seems keen on the champagne too 😉 (don’t worry, it was a child-friendly champagne without alcohol!) And a portrait of Mare and my mum 🙂

Then it was time for speeches! There were several, including a long emotional one by Kaya’s mum (first photo) and also a long one by Bart and Kaya themselves, with some tears but also a lot of laughter 🙂

Paul took this nice panorama of everyone listening to the speech by Kaya’s mum…

Then there was time for presents, though most people had given their presents earlier so they didn’t have to take it to the island and back 😉

Here are two family portraits, first one with my parents, my sister, my 2 brothers and me, and then one including Kaya and Paul 🙂

And a photo with my mum, Mare, Paul and me…

After the speeches, Bart and Kaya had arranged rental bikes for everyone, and we cycled to the other side of the island. Bart and Kaya had a special “freight bike”, see the photo below. We cycled almost 10 km, and we had the wind against us for most of it – poor Bart!! 😉

We had a very nice lunch in a small restaurant there. After lunch, Bart and Kaya went off with the wedding photographer/friend 🙂 to get their official portraits. We went for a little walk on the beach before returning to the accommodation where we had a big bbq in the evening. The place we stayed had a big garden with a fireplace, and we sat around until late at night. It was a great day! For the official photos, keep an eye out on Bart & Kaya’s weblog. UPDATE: they can all be found here 🙂

We stayed on Vlieland for a few more days, I’ll show some photos of that in my next post! It’s hard to find time for the blog though, now that we have a *real* summer here in Tromsø, with temperatures of 25 degrees 🙂 Quite unusual, but really nice! We’re making the most of it 🙂