Honeymoon Phase

Honeymoon- “artist’s” rendition

When I first saw, “Hire your honeymoon planner!” as an item on a wedding to-do checklist in some magazine, I laughed and rolled my eyes. Just another example of princess-bride-complex! We’ve gotten to the point that we can’t plan our own honeymoons now- we need a representative to do it. Who are we, the Obamas?

We’ll be planning it OURSELVES, I thought as I squinted to read my magazine from atop my high horse.

And we are. But man, it would be f***ing amazing to have someone else do it. I’m now convinced that the person who came up with the “honeymoon planner” marketing strategy is a damn genius.

It turns out that after you’ve been planning a wedding for a year, give or take, the LAST thing you want to do is plan MORE things. So we put it off and put it off, thinking that we’d get to it when we had more things for the actual wedding squared away.

And then, with just about two months to go, I realized that there was never going to be a point where everything was “done.” Well, maybe June 28th- but that’s probably a little late to start planning a honeymoon that’s due to start June 29th.

So we set an ambitious goal for ourselves- we were going to plan everything in a single evening. To be fair, we weren’t starting from total scratch. We had bought our airfare back in December, so our dates and destinations were set. We had a Google doc going with links to cool pictures of stuff in each country. We had a general idea of the feel we were going for (Artic circle road trip). But that was about it. Basically, the adult version of a trapper keeper with travel stickers on it.

But we cleared an evening, ordered a pizza, and sat side-by-side with our laptops. The best thing about procrastinating to book a high-season trip in places with limited accommodations (Iceland, Isle of Skye) is that you don’t get paralyzed by choice. Once we figured out our route, choosing accommodations was easy, because we only had a couple of non-sold-out options from which to pick.

We didn’t manage to actually plan 15 days in a single night. But we managed 5, and then another 5 the next night. Now, we just have a little stint in Norway to go. We have a fleshed-out little map, with routes to places with names like from Kirkjubæjarklaustur and Snaefellsnes. We have places to stay and cars to drive around. It’s HAPPENING.

And I can’t fricking wait. For all of it.