Jenna & Ekhard de Jager

Venue: Homestead & Conservatory

Guests: 130

Photographer: Pixel Pro

2010-04-22

Our Love Story

By Jenna de Jager

It was in the month of September 2005, aged 18 and I was waitressing at a little pub in Port Elizabeth called Aviators. My husband, boyfriend at the time was busy studying in PE and he lived in a house with a few guys he studied with and they had supper at Aviators every night. Funnily enough, I hadn’t seen him before in all the time I worked there until one night he came to collect take-aways.

Ekhard: With no intentions to meet a new girl or start a relationship, I, aged 19 arrived at the pub with nothing more than torn tracksuit pants, t-shirt and no shoes – I don’t think there is any better deterrent than that, but even being dressed like that I managed to draw the slightest attention from none other than Miss Jenna van Niekerk herself. I was sitting at a table with two of my friends while we waited for the take-aways and they kept telling me that she was looking a t me. Being as shy as a Grade 4 boy, I definitely didn’t notice nor did I try look up to see if it was true or not – I was absolutely terrified for some reason that I don’t know. We eventually got our food and our the way back home I started thinking about this dilemma I found myself in – does she maybe like me? Do I want a girlfriend? Why was she looking at me? Did I even look at her long enough to think she’s pretty? All these questions raced through my head while I couldn’t stop hearing my friends moaning for me to turn back. I eventually decided to ‘grab the bull by the horns’, turn back and introduce myself. The only problem was that each time I got to the pub, I had such stage fright I couldn’t go in, so ended up driving up and down from the house and back a few times before I eventually went in to speak to her. To my disappointment / relief, when I got inside, she had finished her shift and gone home. I really didn’t want to leave empty handed, so asked her friend if she could possibly give my number to her and ask her to sms if she wished. I then tucked my tail between my legs and headed home.

Jenna: Little did he know that I had not gone home after my shift ended and had met some friends out for a drink and during the evening my friend sms’d me and asked me to stop by her place on the way home. At 3am I went to my friends house, where she explained that this gorgeous guy that I was indeed staring at, had come back and give his number to me. Without thinking, I sms’d him at 4am and to my surprise I received an sms back about 15 mins later, so I got into bed and we ended up smsing each other until 7am that morning! Eventually after 4 days of smsing, we decided to meet for coffee after school. I definitely knew that there was something different about this guy, so decided to invite him over the very next night to meet my parents, as I was in no mood to waste my time with this guy! To my surprise, he agreed and came over for a braai and from there, the love started to blossom.

Four years later, the love was very deep and strong and we knew that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. So, on the weekend of the 3rd April 2009, he took me away for a romantic weekend (a regular occurrence) to the Tsitsikamma Forest, where we stayed in a beautiful log cabin at the foot of the mountain. On the Saturday morning, we drove down to Storms River where we went for a walk and crossed the Storms River Mouth on a suspension bridge. After that, we went back to our lodge, where he had planned a packed picnic and walked through Lovers Trail in the Tsitsikamma Forest. We got to a beautiful place where there was a huge pool of water and waterfall and decided to sit and have lunch. We dived into the pool, went for a romantic swim and ended up sitting in each others arm on a rock on the other side. He asked me if I love him, how much I loved him and I was confused and suspicious and before I could answer, he slipped the ring on to my finger and asked me to marry him. Shocked, surprised, speechless – all I did was stare at the ring for a few minutes, asked him if he was serious and then started jumping up and down and screaming from excitement – he was still waiting for an answer from me. I shouted YES and jumped into his arms – I was filled with so much excitement and happiness.

At the end of that year, I finished my studies and moved to Pretoria. I spent the next 3 months planning the wedding and finding us the perfect home to move into once we were married. The first task was to send our ‘save the dates’ out, and then it was to find the perfect venue. I went on to the Internet and searched for all wedding venues in Johannesburg and that was when I cam across the area of Muldersdrift. We decided that we would look at all the wedding venues there first. We looked at two and the third was Oakfield Farm, and that is the day I knew I was going to have the fairytale wedding that I always dreamt of. As we drove into Oakfields, I fell in love, all the beautiful gardens, trees, flowers, greenery, horses, stables, chapels and reception halls – it was like I was in a fairy tale land where you forgot about everything else in the whole world once inside the premises of Oakfield Farm. It was everything that I was, I grew up on a farm and I am a horse rider, so have a great love for authentic beauty, horses and calmness. Ekhard and I looked at each other and we knew that this is the place where we wanted the start of our life together to begin. I looked at my mother in law and smiled and she knew that this was where her some would be married.

From there I had the venue and because Oakfield was so perfect, I had very minimal work that needed to be done! They provided everything and the wedding chapel and venue was so beautiful, we did not want to change a thing, so all I had to worry about was a photographer, videographer, DJ, florist, priest, cake and someone to make my invitations. We had a tight budget and knew we could not go over, so we prayed and trusted in the Lord that he would send all these people that we needed that would be perfect for our day, just as he sent us the most amazing wedding venue. So, when I met all the people, I always knew who I had to have and at the end, because I trusted in the Lord and took who he wanted, we had the most beautiful, mind blowing fairy tale wedding without going over the budget! So, this was very stress free for me except for the guest list and seating arrangements. Oakfield’s service was so great that they made my journey of wedding planning very easy and gave me the most beautiful day of my life where nothing went wrong on the day. They made sure everything ran on time and how it was supposed to have and I know that without Oakfields, our wedding would not have been as amazing as it was.