Weddingbee Blog

Well, hello there hive. It’s been exactly one month into married life and I just stepped foot on terra firma after a 49-hour journey home to beautiful Aotearoa (more on that later). Perhaps I owe you an apology for my prolonged absence. But you didn’t really expect me back too soon, did you? We had a lot of newly-wedded bliss to absorb. And absorb it we did, in nearly every state north of Virginnie. I’m not quite ready to share wedding recaps yet, but I did miss you. So, I hope in the meantime you wont mind if I share a bit about what we’ve been calling our stay-cation-moon.

Mr. Veggie and I had given very little thought to how we might spend the weeks following our wedding.

Planning for the wedding itself was so all-consuming for me that I really couldn’t think beyond eight.twenty-one.ten. And Mr. Veggie? Well I think the thought of being married was so alien to him, that he really couldn’t even ponder planning something that would happen once we were on “the other side.” So, we didn’t plan.

Lavish vacations to exotic locales aren’t exactly our style, and PhD research, a new house, and spring veggie planting were calling us back to NZ. With our return flight scheduled for Sept. 17th, about 4 weeks after the wedding, the only option we had even remotely considered was going to Nicaragua for two weeks while we were still in the Western hemisphere.

Do any of you have a place that just grabs your heart, and even though you have no particular cultural-familial tie there, it just speaks to you? Nicaragua is my heart place.

It pains me that since we moved to New Zealand, over 2 ½ years ago, I haven’t been able to make it there. We have both done quite a bit of work there over the past 9 years, and it is where our non-profit (and we) will be located eventually. A post-wedding trip there would be more of a volunteer/ visiting friends/ networking trip than honeymoon.

But alas, once we were both in the States, and realized how precious our time was with our friends and family, a Nicaragua trip just seemed excessive. “Hi family, hi friends, yeah we know we haven’t see you in a year or two, and we know we’re only here for a few weeks, but you wouldn’t mind if we ducked out to Central America for a week or two, would you?”

Of course they wouldn’t mind. Because that’s how awesome they all are. And it is precisely that awesomeness, the sheer overwhelming awesomeness of our friends and family, that led us to decide that the best way to spend our free time was with them. And thus, our stay-cation was born.

A borrowed pick up truck, some camping gear, and the leftover cases of wine from our wedding and we were off.

You might think that four weeks is a lot of time to spend bummin’ around the Northeast at the end of summer. Let me tell you something, my friend. It is not. It was the fastest four weeks ever.