When Alanna Smith walked out of the hot yoga class she had just taught back in the Fall of 2011, she spotted a gorgeous woman casually leaning against a wall. Immediately intrigued by the beauty in front of her, she proceeded to lose her footing over a pair of sneakers and fell into the wall. Little did she realize, she had just fallen in more ways than one.
The woman in question was Sabrina Storozuk. “I knew instantly she was going to be trouble,” Alanna recalls, adding, "in the best possible way.” Sabrina, whose mutual friend had told her about Alanna, strategically placed herself outside of her class in order to meet her. Her first impression that fateful day: “A mixture of intrigue, combined with a touch of the awkward,” she states, fuelled in part by Alanna’s magnificent stumble.
The couple’s first date was an intimate dinner at home, arranged by Alanna. She prepared her homemade lasagne and served a chamomile grappa for dessert that she had recently brought back from a trip to Italy. As Sabrina, a self-described tech geek with no culinary aspirations or skills, puts it, “how could one not fall in love with her?!” On New Year’s day, 2016, while on vacation in Maui, Sabrina proposed to Alanna in a hammock at the Ritz Carlton Kapalua. Several hours later, after an afternoon of surfing, the two knew this was the only place they wanted their wedding to take place - they saw it as a dream to have their friends and family all together in their happy place to witness their union.
Sabrina and Alanna's Hawaiian wedding took place last November, surrounded by pine trees, lush greenery, crashing waves and a big sky. As with many destination weddings, the gathering was an intimate group of 35 friends and family. Alanna and Sabrina opted for a formal wedding, but allowed their male guests to 'go local' and don traditional Hawaiian shirts. Right after the ceremony, the newlyweds arranged a coconut stand for their party, where freshly picked coconuts were trimmed with a machete, and then used as vessels for fresh coconut water, a strategic bit of hydration before the evening's libations. The wedding party then moved from the ceremony to Merriman’s, a well-known nearby restaurant famous for their cocktails, locally sourced ingredients and sunset views.
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