On Planning a Honeymoon

When we first got engaged, we had already been talking about taking a trip to the USA in 2013. It's my grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary and my mom and her siblings are planning a reunion. Jeff hasn't met any of my family in person (except for Mom) and I want to show him where I grew up, much in the same way he's shown me those things since we got together.

Personal photo: Mom and I's vacation to New Zealand (when I met Jeff)

So we set a wedding date (yay!) and started looking at traveling back to the USA in relation to that. Since we are paying for the wedding ourselves and both work minimum wage jobs, paying for a big trip right after the wedding seemed a little out in left field. Financially we couldn't do it.

Image via: Darrell Young Photos

We looked at a trip for a month after the wedding, but again that meant we would have had to book our flights already and we don't have that kind of money (most of the time it's a good thing we don't have credit cards, but when it comes to major purchases, it sucks). So we started looking at taking an end-of-the-winter trip back to the USA. Remember folks, the seasons are opposite here to the Northern Hemisphere. That means that the hot, sticky summer birthdays I grew up with in July are now cold, midwinter deals here in NZ. Taking a winter trip home has several advantages for us.

1- We can save for a longer time before we go on this trip.

2- We can hopefully get some financial help from the wedding because we're not registered anywhere except for our honeymoon fund.

3- We'll be visiting the US at the end of summer. While I'm sure it's going to be extremely hot in mid-August, I'm stoked about that time of year.

4- This time period actually falls in between Jeff's two seasonal jobs (our wedding falls in the other gap) and it will be easier to take time off and go away.

So now that we've decided where we're going for our honeymoon, Jeff goes and decides that he wants to go somewhere right after the wedding, a minimoon, as it's called in the online wedding world. I'll tell you more about that later though. It may or may not involve a campervan.

Image via: Telegraph.co.uk

Did anyone decide to take a honeymoon further along in their first year of marriage? Will you be going somewhere new or familiar? Who is taking more than one trip to celebrate their wedding, like us?