My friends are getting married and I am going to be the officiant. In the ceremony, they left a spot for me to “tell their love story.” They met in Thailand. He is Dutch and she is from Wisconsin.
My friends are getting married and I am going to be the officiant. In the ceremony, they left a spot for me to “tell their love story.” They met in Thailand. He is Dutch and she is from Wisconsin. I want to capture the essence of travel and love, and need for them to learn everyday and remember their vows they made.
This is thier website and they share their story, But i need to tell it from the heart and from my view point. I do not want to let them down. I also met them in Thailand and became friends, I was there from the beginning and they trust me to deliver, Please look at the script, and also look at the link to read their story. Their families will be present and want to be great. https://www.theknot.com/us/steven-and-holly-harrington-aug-2022/our-story
https://www.theknot.com/us/steven-and-holly-harrington-aug-2022/our-story
We met each other in Bangkok, Thailand at Bodega Hostel where Steven was working as a bike tour guide and Holly was traveling solo for a summer trip after the first year of graduate school. Holly went on Steven’s 30 km bike tour around Bangkok (with 100% humidity), and then we spent the next 3 days in the city together. Holly went on to travel around the rest of Thailand for a couple of weeks and Steven took a trip to Myanmar.
At the end of Holly’s trip, she was flying home from Bangkok and with an 18 hour travel day, Steven made it back to Bangkok in time to say goodbye. Holly went back to start her second year of graduate school while Steven stayed and traveled around Asia.
While Steven continued to travel around Indonesia and East-Timor, we decided to meet up in the Philippines during Holly’s winter break.
In the Philippines we saw plenty of waterfalls, swam with a whale shark, went diving with millions of sardines and thrasher sharks, went canyoneering through a river, and spent many nights enjoying the sunset on the beach.
After our trip to the Philippines we stayed in contact daily. Steven returned home and landed a new position in Stockholm, Sweden. After Holly completed her Master’s degree, instead of moving to Vietnam right away, we decided that she move to Sweden in September and we would give things a go.
While Holly didn’t have a working visa in Sweden, she spent the time searching for a job and had some of the coolest interviews ever. We spent our time in Sweden exploring the Swedish archipelago, took a trip up north to see the northern lights and the king’s trail, and made our way over to Åland.
Unfortunately, after a couple of months Holly wasn’t able to find a position willing to sponsor her for a visa, so she needed to leave the EU. Steven’s position was meant to be until the next July, however, on the day Holly accepted a position in Vietnam and just two weeks before she had to leave, Steven’s contract was cut short (possibly due to a wish Holly made on the boy who watches the moon statue). While we were sad for our time in Sweden to end, it meant that we were able to make the move to Vietnam together.
Now that Steven was free to go along to Vietnam, Holly moved straight to Ho Chi Minh City from Stockholm to begin working as a teacher and Steven joined a couple of weeks later. Wanting to make full use of our time in Vietnam, we made many trips around the country from the very south all the way to the most northern point in Vietnam and nearly everywhere in between. We decided to celebrate the lunar new year traveling around Cambodia and making our way around motorbike loops in Laos.
After Vietnam, Holly returned back to Wisconsin to work while we waited for her Dutch visa to be approved and Steven returned to the Netherlands to find a job and an apartment. In September 2019, Steven flew to the US and took a three week trip around the country visiting many friends and family along the way. In a speed tour through: Wisconsin, Indianapolis, Ohio, The Rocky Mountains, Nashville, New Orleans, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Nebraska, and back; we crammed in everything from: college football game day, camping, hiking the Smokey Mountains, Steven’s first time shooting a gun, to axe throwing.
After that road trip, we packed up everything in Holly’s storage unit and moved to The Netherlands with Fridley in tow.