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When you see Lacey and Cayleb together, their love is truly apparent. But it sure took a while for things to warm up between them. “We met through friends,” Lacey explains. At the time she was living with Cayleb’s brother and another friend in a roommate situation. “We didn’t really hit it off right away. Funny we are married now!” she laughs. Though her first impression of Cayleb wasn’t romantic, things sure started changing. “He would come to visit often. We would have dinner parties or go up to the mountains and play in the snow. We went to the movies and shopping,” she says. And soon enough, Lacey and Cayleb built upon their solid friendship and became a couple.
However, marriage still wasn’t quite in the cards just yet. The couple dated for six years before Cayleb proposed. “I was terrified of marriage and was convinced we would be fine just the way we were for the rest of our lives. But he assured me marriage is what you make of it, and we would make ours last,” Lacey remembers, and that’s how she knew that Cayleb was “the one.”
Because they usually had very romantic Valentine’s celebrations, Lacey wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary on Valentine’s Day 2007, even when Cayleb pulled out all the stops and made a fancy dinner complete with candles and music for ambience. But at the end of the night, he ensured it would be one holiday she would not soon forget and asked Lacey to be his wife.
When it came time to start the planning, the couple knew they wanted to create an atmosphere where everyone was having a great time. They decided on a Hawaiian theme and held the ceremony and reception at Lacey’s mother’s ranch in Penn Valley where they created a tropical oasis. “In many ways I think I planned my wedding backwards,” Lacey laughs. “But ‘traditional’ isn’t our style. We set our date when we could get our DJ and his band! He was the first vendor we booked — about a year in advance. Everything else we booked three months before the date. Talk about priorities!” she says.
Without a doubt, though, the top priority of the day was becoming the new Mr. and Mrs. Bowman. In a dress she ordered from Hawaii, Lacey met her man at the end of the aisle. “It was an out of body experience,” she says. “I was happy, excited, numb.” Once Lacey and Cayleb exchanged their I Dos, no time was wasted in starting the celebration. Their 300 guests donned flower leis and received pina coladas to get the party started. In keeping with their Hawaiian theme, attendees dined on a buffet of traditional luau cuisine including Kaluah pork, teriyaki chicken, and Hawaiian style pork, which was actually cooked underground.
Looking back, the Bowmans couldn’t have asked for anything more from their special day. “We loved it because it was ours,” Lacey says. “We cut out a lot of the tradition and kept the things that meant the most to us. In the end, it was beautiful and exactly what we wanted.”
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