Why We Waited Over a Year to Take Our Honeymoon

I cannot believe we are about to set sail on our New Zealand honeymoon adventure! I am feeling alllll of the emotions. If you’ve been following my stories on Instagram, you’ve probably heard me talk about how nervous I am for the flight (#anxioustraveler). We are taking a longer route than we should to get to New Zealand because Yale wanted to fly the new United Polaris business class. Aviation is not my thing (he’s a total aviation nerd), so I let him geek out over our flights.

Anyway, if you’ve been following me since last year when we got married, you may remember we took a 5-day minimoon to Charleston and Kiawah (I’ll link that travel post HERE). That trip was wonderful, and just what we needed after our wedding day. We were able to rest and recap the wedding on Sunday with friends, and then drove to Charleston (should’ve flown but…nervous), Monday morning. It gave us a couple of days down south before heading back home and facing reality.

We never really debated whether or not we wanted to do the honeymoon right after the wedding. Knowing my anxiety, I knew traveling somewhere for 2 weeks after the wedding would’ve been too much to handle. Sure it would’ve been easier not planning the dog sitter logistics since we didn’t have Buzz then, but we knew we wanted to go somewhere far away for our honeymoon, and wanted to take at least 2 weeks.

Also, taking a minimoon and delaying our honeymoon gave us the chance to plan and look forward to something else. Ideally, I would’ve loved to take our honeymoon this past summer. Yale’s schedule would’ve been more flexible, and we wouldn’t have overlapped with the Holidays. However, once we decided on New Zealand, we wanted to visit during their Spring/Summer months (rather than their Winter….our Summer).

One day Yale just happened upon our flights, and the rest was history. He had been saving and accumulating credit card points for YEARS before spending any of them. Not to get too into the credit card point conversation, but we both have the Chase Sapphire Reserve card which offers great signing bonuses and point conversions that translate to airline miles. Yale’s done all the research on the best credit cards (I should let him write a post about this because he’s a wealth of knowledge on the credit card point game), and he determined a few years ago that for us and our location, United offers the best selection of International flights, aka flights we’d want to spend points on since they’re usually much more expensive than domestic. Chase points translate to United miles.

WOAH went off on a tangent there.

Anyway! I am so thrilled we waited OVER A YEAR to take our honeymoon, despite my anxiety about the flights/trip logistics. We wanted to do something BIG for our honeymoon, and debated Europe, but figured there wouldn’t be another time in the near future that would allow Yale to take 16 days off of work for travel. New Zealand (in my opinion) requires AT LEAST 10 days, from what I can tell based on our planning. I’ve been planning this trip since May, and honestly can’t imagine being organized enough to take it right after our wedding. That just wouldn’t have worked for US, personally. We also didn’t work with a travel agent. Maybe had we done that we would’ve been able to take our honeymoon right after the wedding.

I can’t wait to get there (after a 34 hour travel day), and share our adventures with you guys. I’ll of course be doing a FULL travel recap of the spots we’re visiting (Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Napier/Hawke’s Bay, Rotorua, Waiheke Island and Auckland). I’ve heard only incredible things about New Zealand, so I am beyond thrilled to see what all the hype is about!