Honeymoon Gone Crazy

If you had anything to do with our wedding this past July, or even knew us over that time period, you have likely heard this story before. Feel free to skip ahead….for everyone else, pull up a chair, grab a coffee and let’s see how this Round The World adventure came to be.

Choices for honeymoons are endless: Mexico, Hawaii, Greece, Bahamas etc…all of them full of romance, love, mojitos, and warm, warm sun. But this was a pretty big choice, and we didn’t want to screw it up, so we did the honourable thing: left it in the hands of family, friends, colleagues, and absolute randomness!

We would come up with a list of ten potential destinations, and once all was said and done, one of those ten is where we are going….confused yet?

Well, let’s try this:

Step 1:
Over two bottles of homemade Malbec, we spent an evening in November 2009 spinning the globe (completely unrelated to spinning the bottle, a game Shawna is no longer interested in). Each of us had five blindfolded spins….and just like that, we had our list:

• Chile
• Namibia
• Malaysia
• Suriname
• India
• Madagascar
• Brazil
• The Marshall Islands
• Switzerland
• Bolivia

Step 2: Over the next seven months, one of those destinations would be eliminated each month, and there was nothing we could do about it.

December 2009 – Skott’s parents mashed Malaysia from the list
January 2010 – Shawna’s folks squashed Suriname
February 2010 – India was iced by our colleagues at work
March 2010 – Namibia was negated through a good old fashioned game of “random draw out of the hat”
April 2010 – The Marshall Islands was muffled by Shawna’s sister
May 2010 – Bolivia was broken down by our fine feathered Facebook friends
June 2010 – Switzerland was swapped out by Skott’s siblings

And so there you have it, down to our final three: Brazil, Madagascar, and Chile.

Everyone who was invited to our wedding on July 3rd, was then given their ballot, and at the stroke of 11:15PM that night, after an incredibly arduous vote-counting procedure it was proclaimed that:

Shawna and Skott…you are going to…..

MADAGASCAR!!!

And there you have it, we are destined to go to the land of the talking penguins for our honeymoon! We thought the whole thing was pretty cool.

In all honesty, the rest of the story is almost anti-climactic. We began researching Madagascar….wow if you are ever looking for a random destination that will cost you way more money than a 3-week honeymoon should, try THIS place.

Regina to Antananarivo isn’t exactly a direct flight…not cheap. We knew there was no point in spending this much money for anything less than a 3-week vacation, and for both of us to get that time off work period (as of this post, and ideally until we quit a few weeks before takeoff, Shawna and I work in media sales for the same company) was going to be tough. Plus, while you are in the neighbourhood of Madagascar, you pretty much have to spend some time in South Africa, maybe Kenya….and I mean Namibia was on the original list!!

We were driving home from Moose Jaw one Sunday (I recommend the Mineral Spa, seriously), and we were discussing how incredible it would be to actually go on a world tour and check out our entire list of 10 Honeymoon Destinations…and that’s about all she wrote. I remember I spent the rest of the night googling anyone else who just may have tried any sort of RTW quest. (The first travel blog I found is right here.) And we haven’t stopped researching since.

Now of course we had all of those other conversations: is it smart to quit are jobs? What will our folks say? If we had a baby in Madagascar, would he have an afro? Perhaps we can discuss these in another post.

And that is it, that’s the story.

I hope you enjoyed your coffee.