Engaged in 2018, married in 2023, and a month-long honeymoon booked for 2025. How did we get here?!
In The Great Before (pre-2020), we planned to have a very small wedding in France in October 2020 at the vineyard outside Bordeaux where we got engaged. The plan was to continue flying east for a round-the world honeymoon, hitting Turkey, Singapore, the Cook Islands and then California on the way home to the East Coast. Needless to say, those plans were scratched right before we were scheduled to fly out to Bordeaux to plan everything in late March 2020.
We shelved the idea of a wedding altogether until the spring of ’22, when we realized we really wanted to give our friends & family a reason to travel to Bordeaux, a part of France none of them had been and that we truly love. Over the next few months, our ideas evolved into what would eventually become our Euro wedding week in early October 2023: a friends weekend in Amsterdam, a co- bachelor/bachelorette in Paris and a three-day wedding outside Bordeaux with about 80 friends and family.
We still loved the idea of a round-the-world wedding, and at this point, had our sights set on Japan after a trip we planned for 2022 was canceled due to the panini. But we didn’t want to do it right after the wedding, so we went on a “mini moon” to Tunisia right after the wedding and started to plan the honeymoon to Asia for early 2025.
Fast forward to today, late April ’24, and the plane tickets are booked for our early spring trip. After hoarding points for a couple of years, we booked our first award redemptions in biz class on Turkish and Qatar Airways, roundtrip for the two of us for about 300k Amex points and 85k Chase points. Could we have gotten a better deal? Sure. But I’ve read enough Reddit threads to know that because I’m both a points novice and an obsessive, long-lead planner, waiting for that elusive T-14 first-class availability on ANA for 60k points wasn’t in the cards for me.
The itinerary is still being finessed but the plan is to hit Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and South Korea with the bulk of our time being in Japan. And a couple long layovers in Turkey and Qatar. [February 2025 Update: We trimmed down the itinerary to just Thailand and Japan, with a couple quick city breaks on the way to & from Japan.]
The countdown starts now: Ten months to go!
PS – I found the below image in this blog’s media gallery from 2019 when we planned the first round-the-world honeymoon. I had found a routing that was only $1,475/person. What a time to be alive!
