Honeymoon Q&A

Hi hi hi!

I thought I would kick off the new year by finally publishing my Honeymoon Q&A blog post because what we ALL need to get us through January is to reminisce about times when we weren’t freezing cold, weren’t on a diet, weren’t at work and to be dreaming of or booking a new holiday… OR, even better, to actually be on holiday.   I have a lot of blog posts to catch up on such as my wedding story with our proper fancy official photos in, Alphabet Dating (we got as far as our ‘L’ date and then all things wedding took over), a Bucket List 30 by 30 update (recently read that first blog post I ever did back and did a wise old judgey chuckle at my naïve 26 year old self’s VERY optimistic idea of a viable bucket list), but for now, while it’s fresh in my brain, I’m going to waffle at you about our honeymoon – peaks and pits, budgets, planning, lessons learnt, how not to get arrested…. etc.

A while ago on my Instagram (@emiliewaffles) I asked if anyone had any honeymoon related questions and there were lots of brilliant ones. This feels like a VERY boring and sensible post for me as I am taking answering all of the questions VERY seriously and want to try give good advice and make sure I get it all right… so, sorry if it sends you to sleep! I’ve split it up into questions rather than a giant chunk of blaaaah so that you can scroll through to the bits you’re interested in (how much it cost yeah?!).

How we got 6 weeks off work:

SO many people asked about this. I’m not sure how helpful my answer is as every workplace is different but I asked my boss’s permission 3 years ago for a 6 week holiday at some point (assuming half paid, half unpaid) and he very willingly signed that off for me. I am lucky that my boss is wonderful and also I think because I often work long hours, late nights, sometimes all-nighters and weekends when deadlines require, he is very generous and understanding about the importance of that work/life balance. I took 4.5 weeks of annual leave that I had saved up, and 2 weeks unpaid. Thomas gets less holiday than me so he took 3 weeks of annual leave and the rest was unpaid.

Side note – if you do this maybe try to stagger the unpaid weeks/months. Foolishly neither of us specified to our employers how we wanted the split to be made so we both had all of our ‘unpaid’ weeks in the same paycheque and it ended up being a really hard month! Holiday blues AND no money. LUSH.

Summary of where we went:

Flew in to New York (3 nights in a hotel and 2 nights AirBnB) – > – bus to Philadelphia (2 nights, AirBnB) – > – flew to San Francisco (4 nights, cancelled our crack den AirBnB when we saw it and booked Hotel Zephyr instead) – > – collected a car and drove to Lake Tahoe (3 nights, The Coachman Inn) – > – drove to Yosemite (1 night, a motel in Merced) – > – drove to Monterey (3 nights, Monterey Tides) – > – I was super poorlysick so we stayed on in Monterey (1 night, Hyatt Regency Monterey) – > – drove all the way to Santa Barbara in one day as the drive was so clear and pretty and easy (2 nights, Harbor View Inn) – > – drove to Los Angeles (3 nights, The London West Hollywood) – > – drove to Dana Point/Laguna (1 night, motel) – > – drove to San Diego (3 nights, The Bristol Hotel) – > – drove to Vegas and dropped off our car (4 nights, Signature at MGM) – > – flew to Turks and Caicos via Miami (9 nights, friend’s house) ….and then we were meant to fly back to New York and have one final hurraaaah there but we missed our flight didn’t we (NOT our fault, still trying to sort, never ever book through Kiwi.com) so we stayed on in T&C and then had to take 3 different flights to get home the next day.

Phew.

Did we use a travel agent to book our trip:

So many people asked this! No, we (I) didn’t! We spoke to travel agents at all the usual companies and honeymoon specialists but they all told me my trip was impossible with my budget. A woman at Kuoni laughed in my face…. I would like to send her a little passive aggressive parcel of my holiday snaps…. We saved SO much money doing it ourselves. We got quoted up to £25,000 from Travel Agents and when you see what we ended up doing it for, including some gorgeous hotels and renting a lovely car, you realise HOW much of a profit margin there is for them.

How we (I…) planned it all:

Having NO experience booking anything like this (I haven’t been abroad much at all because I’m always saving / have spending money guilt) and with Tom being away for work all summer I was reluctant to plan it all myself, but I am SO glad I did. One of my friends, Liam, had done similar trips and gave me allllll sorts of tips with booking, how to save money etc. He also made me a spreadsheet to get me started, which ended up totally changing but it gave me such a good starting point.

The biggest headache was working out how to fit in everywhere we wanted to see and the logistics of what order to do it all in. I don’t know if the way we did it is best but I loved every second. Internal flights in America are super cheap and I wanted to show Tom NYC, plus it’s really cheap to fly there from the UK, so I bought return flights from Heathrow to NYC first and that gave me a start / end point to work with, plus some firm dates.

After that I made a table with a row for each day we would be in America and then gradually started planning each day and our route. I booked flights on the cheapest days and worked around that. I booked hotels on Booking.com so that I could cancel if we changed any plans but I also left lots of blanks for us to decide on once we were there. I didn’t want every second to be pre planned as I wanted to be able to stay longer in places if we liked it there (which we did in Lake Tahoe and Monterey) and not hang around in the places that we didn’t love.

By the time we left the UK I had booked all of our flights, probably 50% of our accommodation and a few activities that I was advised to pre book (Alcatraz, Whale Watching etc) but apart from that everything else got booked while we were there.

How I chose where we went:

I have a travel bucket list so I factored in those places but also asked around a lot, got great recommendations on Instagram and did a fair bit of research. My dentist gave me some of the best tips too! I was really keen to go on recommendations from real actual people rather than travel sites and it was the places that people insisted we go to (Monterey, Santa Barbara, Philly, Tahoe) that ended up being our favourites.

How much we budgeted:

Well. This was a tricky one. We had absolutely nothing booked before our wedding as every single penny went on that up until the day, so we were relying wholly on the wedding gifts we received from friends and family (we used the site www.prezola.co.uk where people can contribute to your honeymoon and even buy specific experiences) and money we frantically saved in the two months between wedding and honeymoon. We were blown away by how much we got as wedding gifts and saved every single penny over the summer and had around £8000 to spend.

How much it ended up costing:

We used that £8000 for all of our hotels, motels, Airbnbs, flights, buses, car rental, activities etc. We set ourselves a daily budget of about $150 for food, fuel and accommodation which we generally stuck to – sometimes we went WAY over (New York) and lots of times we were waaaay under. Food in America, the tipping culture and all the sneaky extra taxes that hotels add on were a bigggggg ass expense, bigger than we anticipated, but we saved loads of money with savvy hotel bookings and last-minute deals. While we were there we both used our monthly salary as we normally would at home, so paid all of our house the bills straight away on payday, paid the dog walker and everything else and then used everything left to go into the spending kitty. I think allllllllll in (including the HELLA expensive flights to Turks and Caicos aaaaand our accidental second return flight we had to book) the entire 6.5 weeks cost us a little under £9000. So about £1500 a week, around £200 a day including EVERYTHING. We stayed in some out of this world hotels (The London in LA was like something out of a movie) and some dives, but we definitely got the balance, did loads of amazing once in a lifetime stuff, ate anywhere and everywhere we wanted and adopted a YOLO attitude to the whole experience. One bit of advice that I got from my friend was to get an American Express while it had an excellent sign up points offer, use it to book everything so you’re covered and amassing alllllll the points, pay everything off as you go and that is exactly what we did. We now have 50,000 points which can be used as airmiles, so I’m pleased with that decision!

Pre-book vs. winging it:

We did a bit of both and I would do the same again. The pre-booked parts are good because you spend longer researching and those tended to be the nicer hotels, but being all last minute and spontaneous suits road tripping too!

Booking flights:

I booked all of our flights on Skyscanner. I don’t know if this is the cheapest or best way but every time I did compare flights on different sites, Skyscanner came up trumps. Do look into the third party companies you then go on to book through when you choose your flights and read reviews – I read reviews for Kiwi.com and they were horrendous but I was really struggling to get affordable flights to Turks and Caicos so I went with them anyway and daaaang do I regret that. They sent us the wrong information about a change of flight times on the day of our return flight so when we showed up at the new time the flight had already long gone. When I then went to click on the link that Kiwi had sent us with all the changes, they had deleted it entirely. Dodgy cockwombles. Sooooo yeah, no problems with any of our flights or bookings apart from that one….

We did look at trying to book an upgrade for our flights to/from America but they are just SILLY money and I didn’t feel like it was worth it. Normally we get given the extra legroom seats anywhere when they see how tall Fat Tom is, so I don’t ever book those either as they cost more. I went for the aaaaaabsolute cheapest tickets I could and that was fine. I did book all of the flights at least a month before as the prices do go up and up and up and we could’ve saved a lot of money I’m sure had we been in a position to book flights many months in advance.

Booking accommodation:

Almost all hotels were booked through Booking.com. We advance booked our New York ones through Secret Escapes but DAMN the first one did NOT look like the photos! It was fine but brown and small and not the shiny modern hotel on their website. In somewhere like New York you barely spend any time in your hotel so I didn’t want to spend a lot and it was a great location, so no problems there.

We missed out on staying in the New York hotel we had booked for the last night of our honeymoon due to the missed flight, but Secret Escapes were lush about the whole thing and gave us a full refund.

Booking.com was brilliant. We cancelled and changed a few along the way and it was really easy, plus I find they set out the FULL cost with all charges really well unlike some other sites. We rocked up to a few motels on the day and those were fine and cheap and easy.

AirBnB… I just don’t know how I feel about it. Our one in New York was a room in this arty hipster guy’s apartment and he was a wonderful man, but our room was tiny and there was no aircorn which in 38 degree NYC is not ok. I also just constantly felt like we were intruding which I’m sure was more my issue than his. He didn’t get up until gone midday so we tiptoed around and didn’t feel like we could make coffee or anything you know?! BUT he had amazing local knowledge and it was SO cheap. Our AirBnB in Philadelphia was a totally different experience. Same price, but we got an entire floor with our own sitting room, large hallway, bedroom and HUGE bathroom. I didn’t want to leave! The host also got in gluten free stuff for my breakfast (when booking I had asked for any gf restaurant recommendations in the area) and she had an amazing dog and it was just dreamy. Theeeeeen we went to San Fran and turned up at this super middle class street but totally in the wrong area for being tourists with no car (my bad), no one answered so we found the key she’d left and let ourselves in and the whole family were just sat there in the front room…. No one acknowleged us. The house was a TIP. Proper crack den vibes. Went to have a wee and there was no lock and a giant steaming turd sat festering in the loo. Our room had no lock and was full to the rafters of the family’s stuff (junk). Bed definitely didn’t have clean sheets on….. I mean… it was weird. We left our stuff and walked to the beach to slag them off in private, and we both agreed to find a hotel in a better location. I am SO glad we did this…. We went back, grabbed our stuff, I waffled to the weird spaced out woman about how we found somewhere else closer to everything and shuffled backwards out of her house then we ran to the end of the road and caught a cab to clean fresh happiness! AirBnB fully refunded us so it was all good but I definitely don’t know HOW sold I am on the concept of staying in a stranger’s house WITH them.

Hiring a car abroad:

This was probably the thing that I got in a muddle about the most. I read a LOT about all of the different companies, asked a lot of people and everyone’s answers were different. One stand out bit of advice is that if you book with the main ones then they have a lot more places to return your car and you wont end up driving miles out of the way to find one of their depots. On advice from my dentist (again, he was very handy) we signed up to Hertz Gold Membership which is free to do and gets you money off your booking too. Our car rental for 4 weeks cost us a little under $1000 including top notch insurance which was definitely a honeymoon perk. It was looking a LOT more expensive than that online and in the UK but when we rocked up to the airport in San Francisco we got talking to the woman at Hertz about our trip and our wedding and she gave us an amazing deal and then upgraded our car too. Jammy.

Best money saving tips:

Shop around a lot and do your research. Food and the tipping culture (which I’m all for) in America is expensive so when eating out we started to order one thing at a time. American portions are MAD and if I ordered my starter and main straight away then 9/10 by the time I had polished off a triple sized portion of nachos (‘for one’) I couldn’t face the main course. We quite often ordered a couple of starters to share and didn’t bother with mains. It is BONKERS how huge their portions are, and I can put away some serious piles of food.

We made the most of hotel breakfasts and coffee if they were included but otherwise we got milk and cereal pots and then would just eat out for one big meal a day in the early evening, or have brunch and an evening meal. Very rarely did we eat 3 meals a day, partly to save money and partly because of the portions.

When booking things to do (aquarium, zoo, museums, rooftop cinema etc) we always shopped around for the cheapest days / discount codes / sign up to get spam emails for life but get free entry in exchange type things. Quite often the hotel you’re staying in will have discount codes for local attractions too.

We spent a LOT of days just sat on beaches or in parks with picnics and books – good honest free/cheap fun.

Where to save and where to splurge:

Hmmmm. I would say try to save on travel – its so short term and in my opinion its not going to be the bit you’re reminiscing about. Plus travel is never particularly relaxing anyway so I don’t know that paying more for a fancy bus or an upgrade is how I would ever spend my holiday monies. To each their own though and if I had piles of cash I would be all over a first class long haul flight.

In the cities we walked EVERYWHERE. We got Ubers when we were totally exhausted (and lost) but where possible we walked and walked and walked. You see more, you burn off your stack of pancakes and you save money!

We really splurged on a couple of hotels and a few really amazing meals but those were staggered between a lot of very average (but still great) places. For our 12 year anniversary Tom booked us into an unreal suite in The London, and we totally milked that hotel. We hardly left apart from to be a bit touristy in the evenings.

Money / cash:

We got a travelcard and used that like a debit card / to withdraw cash as and when. Big bookings happened on the Amex and then got paid off straight away. We found we hardly needed cash at ALL so the travelcard was perfect. We got it from Tui and it was really easy to use – just topped it up whenever we needed to by transferring money across. We didn’t plonk all of our money on their right away, to manage our ‘allowance’ we just did about $200 at a time which worked really well.

Managing budget throughout:

As above really – constantly checked our online banking. Started off in New York like proper ballers but quickly reigned that in! By Vegas money was quite tight and so we were EXTRA chuffed when we both won some money in the casinos!

Packing:

I am categorically NOT the person to ask! We lugged 3 suitcases and a rucksack around for 6 weeks, probably 80% of which was my clothes…. And I reckon I only wore about 70% (that’s what I told Tom, it was for sure more like….35%) of what I packed. I also bought new stuff when I realised how badly I had packed and Fat Tom made me give up an old item of clothing for every replacement item I got. I took them into H&M as they do a clothes swap for vouchers and donated some too. I also reaaaaally should’ve taken my kindle. I hate it but lugging books around the place is daft.

We used packing cubes that I got super cheap from Amazon and those things are the absolute mutt’s nuts. When we were just staying somewhere for a night we would pack what we needed into the smaller suitcase and just use that, rather than unpacking all 3 of them every single day.

Living out of a suitcase is probably the part of road tripping that I liked the least. I think if I was a willowy leggy supermodel who could just throw on some denim shorts and a tee then it would’ve been a whole different situation. But that I am not. I had to contend with chub rub and bloating.

Upgrades / honeymoon perks:

We didn’t get loaaads of these but there were a few. A couple of room upgrades, extra legroom seats on flights, lots of free wine, VIP passes etc. All amazing and just shows that it’s definitely worth acting all in love and soppy and mentioning that you’re honeymooners! I find this reaaaaaally awkward so I didn’t do it loads but we did make a note of it on our booking.com reservations which seemed to do the job!

Favourite place:

Turks and Caicos was the most magical, chilled out, low key place. The whole vibe was totally different to America and I really hope we get to go back there one day. The secret non touristy beaches and the coral reef were probably the most magical you could ever dream to see.

In America, Philly was the big surprise for us! We factored it in to our trip for food and cheap flights to San Fran but I’m SO glad we did. The people were the friendliest we came across, and it felt like a less busy, less stuffy version of New York. San Diego was also a surprise – I don’t think I would’ve necessarily even factored it in to our trip if I hadn’t bought tickets to see Beyoncé there, but we ended up staying for 3 nights and having the best time. It’s really laid back and there’s loads to do.

Lake Tahoe is somewhere I will absolutely be heading back to one day. I reaaaaally hope someone I know gets married there as I can imagine it would just be dreamy. Again, the most wonderful people and we went out of season so it was really quiet and laid back.

Vegas is somewhere I expected to really dislike – busy, garish, dusty, loud, bright and flash. Sure, it was all of those things but I LOVED it. We fully embraced Vegas, which is the only way to do it, and it was the BEST end to the American part of our trip.

Ultimate favourite places in America were probably Monterey and Santa Barbara. I feel like I belong by the sea and Monterey had so much wildlife and beautiful sandy beaches. It reminded me of Cornwall and I could’ve happily stayed there waaay longer. Santa Barbara is where we had the most ‘fun’ – if fun means getting reaaaaally drunk and eating loads of pizza. Again, beaches galore and fit food – it’s all I really want in life.

I also feel like San Francisco deserves a shout out for being SO cool and hipster and full of books and bicycles. As does New York – I adore that place and I don’t think I could ever run out of things to do there / places to eat. I’ve pretty much mentioned everywhere we went….!

Least favourite place:

I feel terrible saying this… but Yosemite was just not for me. It felt like the biggest Instagram cliché, everywhere you turned there were cars full of girls rocking up to a spot, taking 19483752 photos, approving them and then getting back in their cars and driving off. They didn’t even take in their surroundings with their own eyeballs… There were also multiple weddings and arguments between tour buses trying to navigate the roads, MAD traffic that took hours to get through, shops, hotels, chaos. It just absolutely wasn’t what I had envisaged at all and I think I had got my hopes up. It felt really claustrophobic to me and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. We managed to squeeze loads in to our day, somehow, did lots of hiking and saw the main bits so I feel like I can at least say I’ve done it. But I wouldn’t recommend a Saturday and I would recommend going waaay out of season.

Although our hotel in LA was one of my favourite parts of the whole trip, I found actual LA really bizarre. It’s totally soulless, everyone looks too perfect, everyone is chasing fame and fortune, it’s all very shallow and everything felt really insincere. We embraced it and had a wonderful time but I wouldn’t rush back I don’t think.

 Peak:

I think just overall it was having such a long time to switch off, relax, unwind, forget about jobs and bills and worries and just spend time with my new husband. We were both SO chilled out the whole time and my outstanding memory of the trip is just laughing. And eating. Those two things. LOTS. Bliss yeah?!

My peak day was in Turks and Caicos when we walked a pot cake (rescue puppy), snorkled in the sea with turtles and aaaaaall the fish you could wish to see, read our books in the sun and then went back to our house and binge watched some Netflix whilst eating a takeaway. Perfection.

Pit:

My run in with the cops?! Both times?! Also when we arrived in San Francisco to an absolute crack den of a house that was a million miles from anywhere…. Missing our flight in Turks and Caicos was a bit annoying butttttttt cant think of anywhere in the world I would rather be stranded!

What I would do differently:

Pack more sensibly…

My ONE regret is that by the time we got to Vegas our holiday pot was looking very sorry and empty and though we had enough to eat and drink and have fun, I hadn’t anticipated HOW expensive day trips or helicopter rides to the Grand Canyon were. I should’ve booked this in advance OR maybe just been a bit more YOLO and whacked it on the credit card, but money guilt took over and we ended up not going. It’s the ONLY thing in our whole trip that I regret.

Lessons learnt on our honeymoon:

• Planning everything yourself saves a LOT of money
• American food portions are insane – order less than you normally would
• Set a chunk of money aside for all the extra taxes / tips
• You will wear the same few outfits, pack less. Laundromats are everywhere and so cheap and easy, better that than pay $100 dollars for heavy luggage every time you fly…..
• The cops in America can be real douchebags
• I absolutely, definitely married the right man (there was never any doubt).

I am SO sorry if that was the most boring blog post in all of time ever ever but I hope it was helpful for at least one person?! I had a marvellous time reminiscing anyway, and now I’m going to go and cry into my hot water bottle because it’s all over and England is cold.

OK bye xx