Honeymoon in Everyplace

DAYS REMAINING: 351

At the time of our wedding, Eric and I will have been together for five and a half years. We have spent most of that time so convinced we were going to be deprived a Real Wedding that we planned, paid for, and executed two vacations with the helpful rationalization, “Well, we don’t get to have a WEDDING, so this is going to be our HONEYMOON.”

That’s right. We went on two huge trips together out of spite. Spite-cation!

Our first phony-moon took place in the Fall of 2008. We had been working constantly for two years, and finally had a hiatus at the same time. And so we embarked on our European Adventure Tour, which took us first to Amsterdam:

And then on to Paris, where for some reason I crossed two international borders and arrived in the same hoodie:

The fact that this trip took place the exact same week as the beginning of the global economic meltdown only dampened my enthusiasm slightly, as we jetted off on a direct flight from Los Angeles to Amsterdam while Western Capitalism burned 30,000 beneath us. (Not to mention the economic fate of one certain tiny country we flew over.)

The following Spring, my ten-year old Saturn with 170,000 miles on it (a car that had traveled back and forth across the country something like seven times) died in the parking lot of the West Hollywood Trader Joe’s with $200 worth of groceries thawing and warming in the back seat. And since I was driving to set 80 miles round trip nearly every day to production meetings beginning at 6am, I could NOT afford to have a car that died in the parking lot of the West Hollywood Trader Joe’s with $200 worth of groceries thawing and warming in the back seat. So I had to get a new car, wah wah me.

To celebrate, a few months later, Eric and I went on phony-moon #2: A Driving Tour of the National Parks of Oregon. This was a cheaper vacation than our Europe extravaganza, but no less scenic and fabulous.

We drove the car up snowy mountains wearing VERY wrong clothes:

And posed SO fiercely on moody beaches:

And stayed in a haunted hotel near a scary cave:

And quite a honeymoon it was. Again.

Cut to 2010. When we moved to New York in April, we took a hard look at our life savings and decided that this calendar year could feature either a fabulous vacation OR a move to New York. Having cast our lot with this New York thing, we looked ahead to next summer, thinking that, if we worked the whole time and spent no money in the interim, we would be able to afford a trip somewhere in the Summer of 2011. We started scoping out Scandinavian locales, as they were easier to access from New York than they would have been from LA. Knowing that we’d already gone on two honeymoons, we decided this would be just a regular bit of travel, and we roped Eric’s brother David into a trip that would take us to Norway, Sweden, and, time and money permitting, Iceland.

When this morphed into the wedding plan, we scrapped everything but Iceland, and decided our post-wedding…travel…together…thing…would take the form of a driving tour around the entire country. But we didn’t want to lose David from our plans.

And that’s why we’re inviting all of our guests to join us on our honeymoon, as a standard insert in the invitations. We figure that, as long as everyone will be over there in the first place, why not make a real vacation out of it? C'mon...vacation like you can't legally get married!

And you're telling me you don't want to go chill with this?