A Beautiful Love Story among the Ruins of Antigua, Guatemala

Aug 19

AnnMarie & Daniel's Engagement Session

Back in April I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Guatemala for a few days. It was an extremely last minute trip; and when I say last minute that means I booked a flight, packed and was on a plane in less than 12 hours.

Let me give you a little back story, while I was working the Shine Bright - Fertility Event the evening hour of Wednesday, April 26th I saw a message from a photographer friend in Florida, Jillian Tree about needing a last minute second shooter for a wedding she was photographing in Antigua. The person that was originally scheduled to travel with her was sick and unable to fly. Jillian and her family were worried about traveling alone and decided to ask around who might be available. I couldn't reply at the time because I was already working, but the thought of taking off to help her out did start to brew. Antigua, Guatemala has been on list of places I'd like to visit for quite a few years now so I figured, why not now.

Before replying to Jillian I wanted to run the idea by my boyfriend Mehul, we didn't have any specific plans for the weekend, but I didn't want to up and disappear for almost week. We talked about it and he was 100% on board with the idea of of me giving it a go and heading to Guatemala for a few days. The next step was finding a plane ticket to Guatemala City, which is the closest airport to Antigua. I couldn't find a direct flight from Chicago to Guatemala City, but around 11:45pm I was able to find a seat on a flight that connected through Dallas. We talked it over one more time and at 12:30am, I booked the flight which was leaving O'Hare at 11:45am; that meant in a little over eleven hours I would be taking off.

The flight to Dallas was smooth sailing, but my connection ended up with multiple delays, sitting on the runway for a few hours and eventually a different plane to get us to Guatemala City. In the end what was supposed to be a seven hour journey turned into fifteen hour trip. I was exhausted and excited at the same time to have made it to Guatemala.

On the first day I explored Antigua. Antigua is famous for its well preserved Spanish Baroque influenced architecture as well as a number of ruins of colonial churches. I couldn't help but be in awe of such a beautiful place and even better is we had we also had an engagement session scheduled with AnnMarie and Daniel. Jillian and I met at AnnMarie and Daniel at La Recoleccion and in the first few moments the connection between the two of them was so obvious. There was no doubt that they are genuinely in love and enjoy their time together. Since AnnMarie is into rock climbing, they had no problem climbing the ruins to get some cool perspectives.