The Honeymoon 1 Year Countdown!

With the 1 year countdown for our honeymoon starting TODAY (eek!!), I’m finally ready to share where we’ll be going. As you might remember, we had a really hard time deciding where to go. We’re both very indecisive – blame it on us both being Libras! – so we find it hard enough to make decisions as it is, let alone fairly big life ones!

My visions of a honeymoon were far flung, exotic desert islands, crystal clear waters and sandy beaches; or exploring America in a huge road trip, bigger than any I’d done before. See, even in my own brain I can’t make a decision, let alone adding someone else’s! Ben wanted to do something more like a cultural European trip, to explore the sights of the continent and so knowing that we’d be somewhere we both know and love. In the end, some destinations got ruled out for us anyway. The case at the moment for many honeymooners is that the vast majority of paradise beach locations like the Maldives, Vietnam and even some parts of the Caribbean are not recommended due to zika.

In the end, it was while we were in Florida in May that Ben threw the idea into the ring that I thought he would never suggest: a honeymoon in Walt Disney World. A Disney wedding and honeymoon is the dream for many of us, but I’d never even tried suggesting it, thinking Ben wouldn’t want to. I was kind of in shock when he came out with it!

We’d known for a while that we would probably do one week somewhere, one week somewhere else, and most likely that we would go for the US – sticking with my road trip idea. I’ve been slowly converting Ben over to fully fledged Disney-addict Mouseketeer and he finally reached that peak in this trip! It was seeing how much the Disney resorts and hotels had to offer, alongside the dining plan plus the parks that sold it to him in the end.

So here’s how our trip will be going: this time next year, we’ll be flying out to Orlando to have 9 days at Walt Disney World at Wilderness Lodge. YES, 9 days!! We wanted to fly into Orlando rather than our usual Sanford since you can get the Magical Express transport free to Disney resorts. We’re not planning to hire a car since we’re staying for the first time in a Disney hotel for the entire stay. I’ve had a night in Animal Kingdom Lodge once and stayed in the Polynesian when I was 6, but this will be Ben’s first time. I know 9 days seems almost excessive, but for our second week, we could only get a flight up there and out of there on the Friday, so we were limited by these.

After our 9 days in Disney, we’re catching another fly up north and heading to upstate New York for a week in a mountain lodge on Lake Placid in the Adirondacks. We’ve visited New England before – I’ve been twice, Ben has been once – and it’s a place we love. I feel so at home there in the mountains and on the lakes. Our dream has always been to see New England in the fall with the leaves turning, plus I want to experience the fun of fall activities in America – visiting a pumpkin patch, apple orchards, hiking in the mountains. Technically New York state isn’t part of New England, but people seem to think we’re visiting New York city, which is actually much farther away – we won’t be able to travel there.

I’ll be talking more about our honeymoon plans over the next year in the run up to it – why we chose these destinations, the thought process into our bookings, and what we plan to do. These posts will be both here for the New York part and over at Disney Days for the first part, so make sure to follow along over there to hear more. The countdown begins!