If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been a bit behind on our our blog. Lately, instead of traveling, our free time has been dedicated to wedding planning. Now that we are officially married and the dust has settled, we are excited to start sharing our honeymoon adventures. In the meantime, we thought we would give you our top tips for planning it!
Plan Early
If there’s anything we’ve learned in this process, it’s that your wedding costs add up quickly. It’s easy to spend your entire budget on your big day, leaving little funds for your honeymoon.
To avoid this, we planned our honeymoon first! It may sound crazy, but knowing that we love to travel, we chose to prioritize our first trip as a married couple. We booked our flights and hotel before finalizing any wedding details. By allocating part of our budget to the honeymoon right away, we were able ensure the cost of wedding didn’t detract from our goal of seeing the world together.
Choose Something Relaxing
This one sounds obvious, but there is a reason honeymoons are depicted as tropical beach vacations! After planning the biggest event of your life, you’ll want to decompress.
We consider ourselves to be pretty adventurous, and to be honest, we viewed our honeymoon as a free pass to take an extra vacation from work, no questions asked. We were tempted to book an exciting trip, seeing new cities every 24 hours and packing in the itinerary of a lifetime. The reality is, we didn’t have time for that kind of logistical planning. A laid back beach vacation simply made the most sense. This doesn’t mean you have to choose an all inclusive resort.
You can still visit exciting new places, but we recommend keeping comfort in mind. We ended up selecting a 5 star resort in Bali, Indonesia. Touring South East Asia helped feed our appetite for adventure, and our luxury accommodations helped ensure we could relax without worrying about little details.
Don’t Expect To Feel Prepared
If you are going on your honeymoon immediately after your wedding, you will not feel prepared. No matter how much time you spend planning the trip, (spoiler alert, you won’t have that much), you will still feel unprepared once you arrive at your destination. The good news is, you don’t have to be an expert!
We had a general idea of what we wanted to see in Bali, but we hadn’t planned any specific day trips or tours. Instead we were open to suggestions and took advice from folks we met along the way. If you don’t usually make friends while traveling, your honeymoon is a great time to start. You can always ask the hotel’s front desk for suggestions, but we prefer to ask our bartenders, drivers or fellow vacationers.
We’ve found some local gems by starting meaningful conversations with the people around us. Chances are, the locals know about great spots that aren’t listed on TripAdvisor and other travelers have done research you didn’t have time to do.
On our honeymoon, we were fortunate enough to meet two amazing couples that not only gave us a goal of what we want our marriage to look like in a couple of decades, they set us up with a fantastic recommendation for dinner. Meanwhile our bartender at the resort taught us about all the delicious fruit that is indigenous to Bali and our hired driver ended up taking us on an extra stop to a very special temple in which he shared his beautiful religion with us.
Embrace the Cliches
The last bit of advice we have for you is to embrace the cliches. We were so blessed with an abundance of love, laughter and libations following our wedding that we were still reeling by the time we landed in Indonesia. We like to think of ourselves as great, travelers, blending in easily wherever we go, but everyone instantly recognized us as honeymooners. I thought I would be embarrassed of this title, but I now know it means we were simply happy, even after 24 hours of traveling.
Embrace this post-wedding euphoria and every moment! Book a couples massage, take silly pictures, laugh a little too loud at dinner. Life is an adventure and if you’re lucky enough to explore the world with your spouse…you’re lucky enough.
Enjoy the adventure!
Loving The Layover 