Picture an intimate wedding on a white sandy beach on the North Shore of Hawaii. Green mountains and pristine clear waters surround the bride and groom as they tie the knot. They embrace one another for a kiss, which ends the short but sweet ceremony. “Now what?” - The bride and groom ask each other.
The newlyweds immediately drove to Shark’s Cove where they knew they could find the perfect wedding meal. Leah Vitez and EJ Vitez ordered their favorite fish tacos from a little red taco truck.
This is not your traditional wedding story, it's BETTER! This story involves two LOST fans who eloped at the beach where the LOST plane crash, live-streamed their wedding ceremony on Facebook and ended the night at the North Shore Taco food truck. Their wedding pictures consist of their mouth stuffed with fish tacos with North Shore Taco’s very one Surfinʻ Taco (North Tacos Mascot).
Read the full story to see what surprise Leah had for EJ on their one year anniversary, in her own words:
Our story is that my husband EJ and I decided to get married on the island of Oahu because of the sole fact that LOST was filmed there. When we first met, one of the things we did together was binge watch LOST from start to finish. I have worked in the wedding industry for 10 years, so when we got engaged I knew I did not want to have a traditional wedding and I wanted to elope.
Oahu ended up being the perfect solution. We came to the island, just the two of us and stayed at Turtle Bay for two weeks. The first day we were there we ventured out and found the North Shore Tacos food truck, across from sharks cove and had the BEST fish tacos we have ever had. We visited every single location that LOST was filmed and we got married on Mokulēʻia Beach (where the plane initially crashed in LOST). We live-streamed the video on Facebook to all of our family and friends. The livestream eventually made the news. The ceremony took 9 minutes, and when the live stream ended we said: so what now? There was no wedding reception and we could go do whatever we wanted for dinner. So we decided to go back to the taco food truck for our favorite fish tacos. It was the absolute BEST idea and BEST wedding meal we could have had. We went back three times before we left.
A year later, when we were back home in NJ, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do for our first anniversary. The first year is the “paper” anniversary and I thought to myself, if I can recreate our wedding dinner and build the taco truck out of cardboard, that would be amazing. Long story short it was a HUGE undertaking as I wanted to make it life size. I had to start cutting and painting it in pieces in secret, and then I could only start building it the day of so he wouldn’t see it until he got home from work. The kicker was at that point we also had a 3 month old baby (another Hawaii souvenir) that I had to work around. My mom came over to help, I was in the backyard building for hours, it would fall down and I would put it back up, it started to rain, the pieces would come apart and I would keep putting it back together, I refused to give up on it mainly because I had no other backup gift. By some miracle I actually ended up getting it to stay up, I had fish tacos delivered from our favorite local spot. I hollowed our pineapples for our Pineapple Tiki drinks. I even bought, assembled, and painted a red picnic table to sit at. It was perfect and EJ was so surprised when he saw it. The tacos were nowhere near as good as the real thing but it came out amazing and that North Shore Tacos truck will always have a special place in our hearts!
