When to honeymoon?

(Alternative post title - honeymoon vs mini-moon)

The obvious answer to the first question is after the wedding. But how soon after the wedding? I suspect many brides (and a fair few grooms) get a bit stressed in the run up to the wedding. Following a period of stress, it's not unusual to become unwell when you finally stop for a rest.

Gadget is quite good at doing this on normal holidays - he often gets a bad cold (or sometimes man flu!)  three days into our trip. This makes him feel tired and not want to do anything, and really changes the mood of the holiday. He's currently got man flu, so I'm hoping he'll have recovered by the end of next week when we go away!

So the question is how to avoid becoming unwell on honeymoon? My preferred answer is not to get stressed before the wedding, but I can't guarantee this (more on this in the next post). When I combine this question with the fact that we don't know what jobs we'll be doing next year and so can't request any holiday/leave until february (at the earliest), I reach an alternative answer - have a mini-moon.

Go somewhere luxurious but not too far away for a few days, and hopefully you won't become ill until you get back. Then, at a slightly later date, go on your "real" honeymoon. This has some obvious advantages around organising and funding the trip, but runs the risk of the honeymoon feeling like "just a holiday."

I'm thinking that honeymooning may be a state of mind rather than a luxury hotel/location though - any thoughts?

A logical attack on the honeymoon

Having read my previous honeymoon post, my dad suggested I should get a map of the world and cross out everything I'd mentioned - literally. Sometimes looking at things really helps.

Blue - countries we've been to.
Grey - countries that are too big/have too much to see in two weeks.
Red - countries listed by the FCO as unsafe.
Yellow - too honeymoon-ey, or too many other people have been.
White - includes places I'm not really interested in visiting (such as Albania), and places that won't work for our honeymoon (such as Bhutan, where you have to do an organised trip, and the pacific islands, which we'll have just left).

Green - the exciting bit - possibilities! Dad was right - I came up with some new thoughts by doing this. Anyone know anything about Guyana or Sao Tome and Principe?

Honeymoon headache

Given that the title of this blog is bride around the world, and my "about me" piece says I'm a travel junkie, you're probably wondering why there's no travel posts on my blog. There is only one reason - I've managed to get enough wedding stuff sorted to blog about it, whilst the honeymoon planning has barely got off the ground.

An amazing honeymoon is on our priority list. For us it is one of the most important parts of the wedding. The problem is we can't work out what exactly makes it a honeymoon.

I know this might sound silly - a honeymoon is the holiday you take after the wedding. Whilst this is basically true, it also fulfils another purpose. It should allow you to relax and enjoy the start of your married life, and it should also be a trip to remember. That's where we got stuck.

We travel a lot - last year we had 2 one week holidays, a two week one, a three week one and several long weekends. We are also active relaxers - we're not good at doing nothing, if there's something to see or do we're there. We don't like staying in one place, we'd rather see the country and really experience it.  So what can we do to make this trip stand out from all the others?

We tried the big picture approach that we used for the wedding. It was much more difficult, as we approached it from opposite angles. We agreed that we didn't want to move about as much as we do normally (it's unusual for us to spend 3 nights in the same place), and we didn't want a tightly packed itinerary. I think we also agreed on "somewhere that would be warm and dry in May." That's where the agreement ended.

Gadget was trying to work out what activity we would enjoy, and then find the best place in the world to do it (e.g. we could scuba dive, where is the best dive site?). I wanted to find an amazing country that was small enough to see in two weeks, so that it became a 'once in a lifetime' visit, not somewhere we would go back to. I also wanted to avoid traditional honeymoon destinations; I don't want to spend our honeymoon with other honeymooners, or in the same place all my friends went. I don't really know why, but I don't.

Ruling out all the usual suspects, places we've already been, anywhere that has monsoons/cyclones in May plus countries too big to see in two weeks doesn't leave much. Hence the headache.