Wow, a month later and we're still cranking out Thank You cards. The difficult part is writing down all the gifts and keeping track of the addresses.

We had about 180 total cards to write so we split the load evenly and wrote a few cards per night. We didn't do anything special for the thank-you cards. My mom bought about 80 cards from the Dollar Tree (4 card per pack / 25 cents per piece) and we bought 2 50-count packs of cards from Target (20-25 cents per piece). Expenditure on thank you cards is maybe $40 dollars and then $80 worth of postage to send these bad boys out.

Wow, after over 14 months of laborious planning our wedding is finally over. The day went by so fast it was ridiculous. Here's a debriefing and run-down of who, where, and what.

Photographer: Robert Bruce in Royal Oak. Great guy, easy to feel relaxed with Robert and his helper around. Voted 2009 best photographer in Detroit by WDIV channel 4 voters. We are inclined to agree!

Videographer: Alan Lockwood in Birmingham. A pro. He gave us a same-day highlight reel that turned out great.

Venue: Troy Marriott. Excellent and accomodating! We threw the staff a few logistical curve-balls because our ceremony was short and our guests were plowing through food like ravenous beasts but the Kitchen handled all 300 of us without a hitch.

Wedding Day Photography site: Troy Museum and Historic Village. Close to the Marriott, perfect backdrop.

Rehearsal Dinner: East Lake Restaurant. Handled our 50 guests without a problem. The food was decent, we snuck in our own champagne and they let us bring in our own Filipino Roasted Pig (45 pounds!) and they cut the pig for us too! Reviews: Yelp, other.

Wedding DJ: Mary Ann Productions of Royal Oak. Another professional. Great job keeping everything on schedule and making sure everyone had fun.

Honeymoon: Kauai, Hawaii. 3 nights in Poipu, 3 nights in Princeville. Kauai was so nice we're sad that it's over already. Our wallets on the other hand are glad to get some rest.

After debating Maui vs. Kauai for some time, we finally settled on Kauai at the suggestion of many people familiar with the two, some of whom lived in Hawaii for anywhere from 1-4 years. With a glowing recommendation like that, Kauai must be pretty awesome.

Kauai Vacations

Kauai is small but it has a lot of stuff to do on the North and South parts of the island. To make the trip interesting we're splitting time between 2 of the main tourist areas on the island: Princeville and Poipu. Apparently the best places to stay are the Grand Hyatt in Poipu and the soon-to-open St. Regis in Princeville.

We booked our trip through a travel agent rather than the internet travel sites like Expedia. Surprisingly our trip booked through a traditional travel agent turned out to be $170 cheaper than the best the internet could offer (Expedia) AND it had a bigger mid-size car, as opposed to economy

Another tidbit to know is that booking hotel and flight together really does save a lot of money. I had gotten into the habit of booking hotels and flights separately. I found that Expedia has the best booking interface for multi-destination trips or partial hotel stays because, unlike the other internet travel agents, Expedia does not require that you fly to another destination nor stay at the same hotel the entire duration of your trip.

So, what is the most obvious choice for a honeymoon in the summer? It was a surprisingly difficult decision between Alaskan Cruise vs. Hawaii but we're going the cliche route and picking Hawaii. Then you have the decision: which island to pick? The 3 obvious islands would be the Big Island, Kauai, or Maui. It came down to a coin-toss between Maui and Kauai but I'm going with Maui because it's bigger and there is more "stuff" to do. Kauai apparently is more "natural" but honestly we're not exactly a nature-loving couple.

There are 2 areas of super-luxury on Maui: Kapalua to the West and Wailea to the South. How do I know this? Well, the Ritz Carlton is in Kapalua and the Four Seasons is in Wailea. To be democratic about our 6 nights of luxury I want to split it down the middle, 3 nights in Kapalua and 3 nights in Wailea. That should make for a good trip. I'm going to try to arrive on the islands as early as possible and leave as late as possible on the redeye even if it costs an extra $100 bucks for the tickets.

I haven't priced everything out yet but United is the only airline that has direct flights from San Francisco (SFO) to Kahului, Maui airport (OGG). These direct flights are pretty damn expensive but the cost goes down if bought in a vacation package. Frommer's suggests Pleasant Holidays as a good place to pick packages. I spoke with a travel agent who reserved us some accommodations through a packager and the air fare was about $300 less PER TICKET than if you were to build the trip piecemeal.

The sanity-saver in all this is that I happen to have Microsoft Office so we were able to use an Excel-Word mail merge to properly format the addresses so when it came time to print the envelopes I only had to feed them through the printer one at a time.

Preparing our guest list in Excel

To get started I created a new Excel spreadsheet using a template my brother in-law created for his wedding a few years ago. The key to the spreadsheet is that you want to prepare it for a mail merge so that you can print the envelopes without writing out each and every address.

1. Number
2. Status (sent / replied)
3. Regular Names (John, Joe, Mary, etc.)
4. Envelope Name(s) i.e. "Mr. and Mrs. John and Jane Doe"
5. Street Address
6. Address 2 (for Apartment Number, Suite, Flat, Unit, Etc.)
7. City
8. State
9. ZIP
10. # in party
11. Beef (Replace these with your food options if it is per-plate)
12. Chicken
13. Vegetarian

Preparing the Word Template

Setting this up was tricky because our envelopes are not standard envelopes. We were lucky, however, that they had pretty large dimensions (8×8in. with the flaps open, 8×5in. flaps closed). I ran a few test pages on 8×11 inch paper and lined them up with our envelopes to make sure that the return address and mailing address information would print correctly.

Printing the Envelopes

I happen to have a Laser Printer at home so we fed the envelopes through the single-sheet feeder one at a time. The envelopes went through with mild bending. No creases but they got a little warped. However, once you stuff the invitations in the envelopes it will straighten things out. Overall it took about 2 hours to print out 150+ envelopes. Time consuming but at least we saved a few bucks instead of having the printers do it.

Things to put in the envelopes

Now is the time to make sure you have everything. Etiquette suggests that you do not explicitly say anything about gift registries or receiving money. To be as pseudo-polite as possible we included an extra slip of paper provided by our reception site that had driving instructions to the hotel that included the web address for our free wedding website provided by theknot.com. On theknot.com we have detailed driving and hotel booking instructions, our gift registries, and the story of how we met.

• Primary envelope, with extra colored paper lining for effect. Nothing printed. 
• Stamped response envelope with our mailing address printed on the front (costs extra)
• Response cards. Make sure response cards asks for names, # of people attending, and the meal choice (if necessary). 
• On the back of the response card, put a code number that corresponds to your Excel sheet just in case the response name is illegible.
• Invitation card
• Information card with driving instructions, hotel booking information, and website information.