As excited as I am to marry Chris, I think I can safely speak for both of us when I say that we are way more excited for our honeymoon than for the actual wedding! Is that bad? I hope not. I know our wedding day will be beautiful and great, but it is going to go by so fast. Our honeymoon is going to be 10 long days away, just the two of us. And I can’t wait.
I don’t really want to say where we are going yet, but I will say that it’s an all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean. We are not the type of people who are super adventurous….I mean we can be, but we don’t want to be for this trip. We want to have no worries in the world, no stresses, no phones or computers, and just spend the entire time with each other in a beautiful place far, far away from our normal lives. A lot of people have “recommended” (um, I didn’t ask for your opinion) that we don’t leave the morning after our wedding (like we are), but you know what? We want to. I don’t just want to go home after we get married and that’s that. We want it to feel different than regular life and when we get home from our trip, then we can jump back into all of that.
When we first started to plan the trip, our original thought was to go somewhere that neither of us had been before. Chris has never been out of the country, so it’s easy on his end, but I have traveled a lot with my family over the years, so it was proving to be very difficult to find the type of place we wanted to go to in a country that I hadn’t been to yet. So eventually we settled on somewhere I have been before, but not really explored extensively at all (not that we are going to be doing much exploring anyway, haha).
Once we narrowed it down to about 3-4 places, we decided to get a travel agent involved. We just really wanted to ensure that we were picking a place that would meet exactly what we wanted – chill, relaxing, good food and drinks, and somewhere that would pamper us. To be honest, I have a really, really hard time letting other people take care of me. I am always go go go and thinking about how I can help those around me and how to have fun but save money and how to get as much done as fast as possible and so on and so forth. So I’m tired – a lot. And I just really want one week where I literally cannot do any of that. Where I can devote all my attention to Chris and our new life we are starting together.
So anyway, our travel agent is super cool. She actually has personally been to all of the places we were thinking about going and without a doubt, recommended one of them for us over the others. She said that based on what we are looking for, it will be perfect. And that she also sends 90% of her honeymoon clients to one of these resorts and not once has she ever had one of them be disappointed. And then I found out that my best friend’s parents go to this resort a lot and just love it. It always makes me feel better when somebody that I know personally has “tested something out” before I do it.
Neither of us had worked with a travel agent before, so we didn’t really know what to expect. I had no idea how simple it is and have wondered why I have been booking trips on my own all along?! I thought you had to pay to use one, but then I learned that at least for the one we are using, she gets paid a commission by the resorts she books with. And she actually got us a lower price than we would have if we booked on our own. She also deals with all the complicated booking stuff. All we had to do was send her the room we wanted, the dates we wanted, our Delta SkyMiles numbers, and any special requests. So simple!
Even better was that we only had to put down a small deposit up front and have up until 30 days before the trip to pay off the balance. This works really well for us, because we actually are not registering for gifts for our wedding – we are registering for our honeymoon instead. Since Chris and I have both lived on our own and separately for years, we have more stuff than we know what to do with. In fact, we pretty much have double of everything. Also, we are not “stuff” people. We are definitely more “experience” people. Clutter drives me crazy, and I end up going through all our stuff and donating a bunch every couple of months. So why accumulate more? We would much prefer to go on a once-in-a-lifetime trip before the craziness of life gets in the way that we will remember forever.
With all that being said, I feel so lucky that we have such great friends and family in our lives that are so happy to support us through the wedding, the honeymoon, and long after. This is a stressful, but really fun time that is just flying by already.
And on a completely different note, I’ve been home in bed with nasty allergies the last two days and saw this little quote on my tea mug which I thought was perfect and so applicable to life right now:
If you have been on your honeymoon already, where did you go? Was it a relaxing or adventurous trip? Would you recommend it to a friend or go back yourself?
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