Honeymoon

One of the blogs I follow regularly, Betty Beguiles, is having a blog link up! I wasn't much into blogging when she talked about engagements or wedding dresses, but I decided to join in the fun this time!

Husbandy and I thought a lot about where we wanted to go for our honeymoon. Really the only vacations we had been on were to Florida to visit his family, so we were both very excited to get to plan something big! I had always wanted to go to the Caribbean so we looked into all inclusive resorts there, we looked at fun places around the US like Hawaii or Colorado, but what we finally decided on was Europe! 

We quickly figured out that deciding on Europe was the easy part! There is SO MUCH to see, so we had no idea where to go. After asking around and me thinking back on the trip I took to Europe the summer before, we decided on a Western European cruise. This worked perfectly because Husbandy had never been to Europe and I had never been on a cruise.

After our wedding we had to wait two weeks before we could leave for our honeymoon because Husbandy was in school and had a semester to finish! It was nice to be able to get our house in order, however. The morning of our flight, my mom picked us up from our apartment, and wouldn't you know it, there was a ton of traffic on our way to the airport! I was starting to get worried that we would miss our flight, but little did I know what was awaiting us at the airport. As we drove up we looked into the terminal and saw the longest line we'd ever seen! We walked up to the door that had our airline's name on it and a person who worked at the airport said, "Are yall flying Lufthansa?"  "Yes."  "You'll need to use those doors down there, this line hasn't moved in 30 minutes." Oh great, this is just awesome, now we were sure to miss our flight!

(More line to the left)

Our nerves calmed a little bit when we found out everyone in front of us, and behind for that matter, were on our flight. However, we had a connecting flight in Frankfurt we had to make, so that we could get to Barcelona, so that we could get to our ship before it left! Apparently the problem was Lufthansa's computer systems were down and they were having to do EVERYTHING manually! Husbandy and I came up with a lot of ways we thought would be more efficient than their system, and eventually they figured one of them out and we got on our plane.

Lucky for us, our layover in Frankfurt was decently long, and despite the fact the Germans were freaked out by the hair dryer in my bag, we made our flight to Barcelona. Once there, we somehow depicted to our non-English speaking cab driver we needed to get to the big boat on the water and made it to our cruise line, where they greeted us with champagne. (I'm still convinced the cab driver knew exactly what we were saying and laughing at us the whole way. I mean really, why would a cab driver, working the airport, not speak English?)

Our cruise was so relaxing! Our first day was a day at sea and spent most of it in our room catching up on sleep! From then on, we were on the move. Our itinerary included Malta, Napoli, Capri and Sorrento, Rome, Florence and Pisa, Cannes, and Barcelona. Since we didn't get to spend a lot of time in Barcelona, we planned an extra day there after our cruise. Everywhere we went had so much history and was absolutely beautiful! Husbandy and I especially enjoyed our time in Vatican City! It was an absolutely amazing feeling to be standing together in St. Peter's Basilica. We were disappointed to learn the Sistine Chapel was closed for the day, but it did give us more time to walk around the city and more time for gelato. We roaming the city we stopped in Pizza Navona and bought a beautiful painting that hangs in our living room. It was also in Rome we almost missed our train to get back to Civitavecchia. Apparently, one day in Rome is not enough (duh), so everyone waits until the last minute to leave. This is a problem when five different cruise lines leave from the same port at the same time.

I could write eight blogs posts about our honeymoon, one for each day. But I won't bother you with that. I've already got it all documented in a scrap book I made, plus the hundreds of pictures we took. Other highlights did include a bus tour around Malta, going into the Blue Grotto in Capri, lots of gelato, the "Happy Happy, Wakey, Wakey" guy on our ship, amazing sunsets, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, not getting sea sick, La Familia in Barcelona, Fat Tire Bike Tour, taking a picture of us kissing in all the cities we visited, Husbandy's "frying of fish" dinner in Cannes which turned out to be more of the bait than the fish we were expecting, all you can eat food, getting lost in the streets of Italy, Galiano wanting to show us "his city of Napoli", the Cannes Film Festival, and so much more. 

It certainly wasn't a sit on the beach and do nothing honeymoon, but why do that when you have the vacation time and you've planned on splurging!