Planning Our Honeymoon - So Many Options

As I am new to blogging, I am going to attempt to reflect on our Honeymoon as I remember it and not as it was actually happening. The long story short is that we had a great time and came back still very much married, but I give kudos to the both of us for some major compromising and our overall "wing it" attitude.

Pre-Honeymoon:
We got married in October 2012...right in the middle of a huge move across country [Scott: And right in the middle of Hurricane or "Super Storm" or whatever Sandy!] with the company at which we both work. Our work is involved with elementary schools, and since October puts school in full swing, we decided to wait until Spring Break time for our Honeymoon (not to mention that a move + a Honeymoon + adjusting to the atmosphere for work would have been super stressful). Our thing was that you can do a Honeymoon at any time, so why not enjoy it fully - meaning the planning, the actual Honeymoon, and then not dreading coming home.

We love to travel, so we knew our Honeymoon would be a big trip (at least 2 weeks) and we actually started saving money for it specifically. That was the best move we made. We have a vacation fund in our savings account that we allot over 11% of our salary toward and the Honeymoon budget just became a part of that fund. This allowed us to take the "money stress" largely out of the equation and allowed us to be flexible not only with lodging, but with activities, food, souvenirs, [Scott: Irish beer], etc. I will get to this later, but we intentionally put aside more money than our trip budget - this meant no stress even if last minute expenses caught us off guard (i.e. renting a car in Ireland and their REALLY fine, fine print).

Scott studied abroad in Germany and has traveled to a lot of places in Europe, something that I had not had the opportunity to do yet, so we decided Europe was our Honeymoon destination. Plus the fact that we SCUBA dive and do the warm weather/beach thing over the summer anyway. [Scott adds that we also needed a change in weather apparently.] Scott felt since this was my first experience overseas, an English speaking country would be best and, originally, we discussed going to Ireland, England, and Scotland all in one go. Once we had the plan in mind and started reading up and researching places to visit though, we came to the conclusion that 2 weeks was just not enough time to experience all three places. Our vacation time with work was limited, so since 2 weeks was all we had and Scott had never been to Ireland either, Ireland it was!

 Couple Travel Tip: Budget for your trip and then save a little more so you are not caught off guard by unplanned expenses (like rental cars).