Escapism

I'm one-third of the way through my last semester of law school, and all I can think about is taking a vacation. Seems to me to be as good a time as any to tell you about our honeymoon!

We had a few considerations in choosing a destination. First, I only had a week to travel after the wedding, so we wanted to stay somewhere close to home/quick to get to—we didn't want to spend our whole honeymoon just getting there and back. That cut most of the places we actually wanted to go out of the running (I was just dying to take a Mediterranean cruise!). Second, we didn't want to spend tons of money, so that cut out anywhere we'd had to fly to reach. Thus, the honeymoon road trip (to wine country!) was born.

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We'll be skipping the morning-after brunch to make the long slog up to Sonoma, where neither of us have ever been, and spending a few days there before heading west and south back home via Santa Cruz (one of my favorite places) and Carmel. What turned out to be really nifty was that the Spaniel-in-laws had taken a similar road trip for their honeymoon—we'll actually be staying at the same place in Carmel that they stayed 35 years ago (and telling the owners that? Got us a pretty sweet deal on the suite!).

I'm pretty excited about our road trip, but of course I have reservations (and not just for the rooms! Oh!). I love sunny-beachy vacations, and we won't get much of that by heading north in March! I also can be a pretty cranky travel companion (hey, at least I know my faults), and being on the move for most of our honeymoon—packing and unpacking, arguing about negotiating who gets to drive—was definitely not how I'd originally envisioned it. But we've already figured out the ground rules to keep us both happy: complaints about bathroom stops on the road are not allowed, the first person to get hungry decides when to eat, and all other disputes are to be resolved by playing Rock-Paper-Scissors ;). If that's not a recipe for success, I don't know what is.

How did you select your honeymoon destination?