I can’t say wedding planning has been a painful experience, but it has its ups and downs, what with choosing the right band and trying to figure out which photographer‘s eye or style will be better. It’s rewarding, but it’s a challenge, too. Choosing a honeymoon destination, on the other hand, has been all great, all the time.
When we were in Alaska last month, Aimee and I spent some quality time at Title Wave looking at travel guides to possible destinations, from Europe to South America to Oceania. The winner had to meet all of our criteria: somewhere neither of us had been, somewhere that wasn’t too beachy/resorty, but was also not too full of things to do that we’d feel the need to take in sights and museums all the time. We were looking for that delicate balance between relaxation and boredom, between stimulation and overload. Our final answer? It was the dark horse of the bunch, beating out Greece, Tuscany, France, the Swiss Alps, and the rest of the Caribbean: the tiny, pun–prone land of Belize! In the past few weeks, we’ve gone from wondering exactly where Belize was to knowing the sightseeing highlights, the best-sounding beachfront caba?as and riverside villas, and even keeping track of the exchange rate (ok, so that’s an easy one, as it’s permanently tied at $2Bz to the dollar).
The beaches, jungles, caves, and ruins all look tempting, and if that wasn’t enough, the choice was a fortuitous one for other reasons. We found out that USAir flies from Boston to Belize City with a stopover in Charlotte, and USAir happens to be the airline Aimee has been racking up frequent flier miles with for the past few years, with nowhere to spend them. So, our airfare is covered, and we spent the past weekend making some decisions about where we want to go in our nine days in the country. Our Rough Guide was very helpful as we chose our destinations, and we came up with a nice complementary pair of locations: four nights on the beach at Mata Chica in Ambergris Caye, and four nights at Five Sisters Lodge in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Preserve. I anticipate fun water taxi and muddy road adventures getting from place to place, as well – in fact, I’ve never been further south than Ft. Myers, Florida when I went to Red Sox Spring Training with George in 2003, so I really have no idea what to expect. I’ve got a soup of film-inspired pre-conceived notions, a bad mix of Romancing the Stone, Fitzcarraldo, The Mission, and Moon over Parador, so I look forward to going somewhere truly new, ten months from this week.
