September 3, 2024, 6:45 am | Read time: 5 minutes
Usually, a wedding dress is worn only once, then disappears forever into the depths of a closet. Not so Janina Ballali’s dress. The 27-year-old takes her white dream dress with her on every trip – and as a travel blogger, she takes quite a few. Since her wedding, the dress has traveled tens of thousands of kilometers, including to Africa, Asia, the USA, and Central America. Why does she always have the “dream in white” with her? She revealed it to TRAVELBOOK.
When Janina and Marc got married on July 27, 2013, in their hometown of Würzburg, the sun was shining brightly. It was 40 degrees, the hottest day of the year. You could hardly wish for better weather than this for the most beautiful day of your life, as it is always about capturing the bride and groom. In this case, she is in a dream in white, he in a casual tuxedo – for eternity in photos. And, of course, photos turn out much better in the sunshine.
And the result of Janina and Marc’s wedding is something to behold. The two are beaming with sunshine, sometimes standing in the garden with balloons, sometimes in unusual locations such as an empty outdoor pool, on a playground, on an old harbor area, and a jetty by the lake. But there is no real beach in Franconia.
So, the newlyweds took their wedding outfits with them on their honeymoon to Hawaii. “It was an absolute dream destination for us and we really wanted to incorporate it into our wedding photos,” Janina tells TRAVELBOOK. “The dress was simply made for the beach, and I enjoyed posing in it in the sand and by the water so much,” enthuses the 27-year-old. The resulting photos are, there’s no other way to put it, simply enchanting.
The photos on the beach were now in the can, and this dream was also fulfilled. “When I packed up the wedding dress at the end of the trip, I was a little sad that I would no longer have a reason to wear it.” And so, the idea was born to take the wedding dress with her on every vacation trip from now on. Since then, the dress has traveled tens of thousands of kilometers with Janina and Marc to Africa, Asia, the USA, and Central America.
But isn’t it inconvenient to lug the wedding dress with you every time? “Not at all,” says Janina. “The dress is very easy to transport as it doesn’t have a hoop skirt, a corset, or many bulky layers of tulle. It can be rolled up so small that it fits into my husband’s rucksack or even into a larger handbag of mine.” But Janina would never pack it in her suitcase. “I would be far too afraid to transport something so valuable to me in a suitcase.”
The fact that Janina takes her wedding dress with her every time she travels doesn’t bother her husband at all. On the contrary: “He says that when I put the dress on, he feels transported back to the day of the wedding and then thinks about how I entered the church and he saw me in my dress for the first time.” But of course, her husband is not the only one who sees Janina in her dream in white at these dream locations. It is the exception rather than the rule that they are all alone at the shoot.
“Far too often we are watched by interested travelers, which I absolutely can’t blame them for, because I would do the same myself,” writes Janina on her blog, “mostly they just look, but sometimes they also want to play along.” The cultural differences regularly come to light. Germans usually only look slightly reproachful, Americans and Canadians give posing tips, and Japanese and Chinese, of course, take photos of the bride themselves.
There is a lot to laugh about, especially when a shot goes completely wrong. On her travel blog ferntastisch.de, Janina shows the best photos as well as those that went wrong. She writes: “In my defense, I have to say that taking wedding dress photos when traveling is not always easy. There’s usually a lot of wind on the water; it’s often incredibly hot and therefore exhausting, and the motifs we come up with beforehand aren’t always easy to realize.”
The wedding dress will go on its next trip right after Easter. It’s not yet one hundred percent clear where she’s going, probably to Asia. At some point, Janina also wants to stand in her wedding dress in the middle of Times Square in New York. She also dreams of the Grand Canyon. “That would be a very special location for us, as my husband proposed to me there in August 2012 after a helicopter flight on the banks of the Colorado River. “
You can see the most beautiful photos of the wedding dress while traveling in the large photo gallery above!
