moon honey

So where is this honeymoon? Well, you had to know we didn’t take a straight line to get there, so here is the story. Almost every place we talked about involved an island or at least, a lot of water.

We considered Italy, but we thought we might want a relaxing vacation rather than an active, exploring vacation. And Ed didn’t want to pack up every few days to go to a new place.

We considered Australia or New Zealand, but it’s winter there. And I wanted a honeymoon in gloriously hot weather, where getting dressed would mean a swimsuit and a sarong most days.

We considered Ireland, but even in summer that wouldn’t be a warm-weather honeymoon, and we would want to explore a lot there too. Just not on this trip.

Then the Mountain Travel Sobek catalogue arrived – now there’s timing! The catalogue is a lush, heavy-paper tribute to world travel with adventure in mind, and features full-colour, gorgeous, inspiring photographs on every page. We found our spot. We’d go to the Galapagos and tour the islands aboard a tall ship. The dates lined up exactly with our plans.

Yes.

No. I mean, it could have been. We contacted them, and they had room for us. Late last November when we first talked with them about it, they had no reservations for that trip. We were getting ready to go on our December trip to Kauai, and decided to wait until we returned to finalize the details – first trip first and all that.

We returned to chaos in the Northwest – the storms that ripped through Puget Sound left our neighbourhood without power for a full week and many of our neighbours with trees in their houses. Power was restored just before Christmas, and it wasn’t until after the holidays that we thought about our honeymoon.

Uh oh, you’re saying. And you’d be right. Because MT Sobek had nobody booked for the trip, a private charter bought out the whole boat for that time slot. And as we are committed to having our honeymoon right after our wedding, it was time to come up with a new destination.

Then we figured that if we were going to be in Hawaii already, how about continuing west? We thought about Japan, Bali, Indonesia, and Thailand. All were vetoed.

How about the South Pacific – Bora Bora, Moorea, Huahine, and more? We could spend a week on each of two islands, or maybe spend a week on one, and a week on the Big Island of Hawaii on our way back, to break up our travel. Hmmm… there’s an idea.

But it turns out that the flights don’t go through Hawaii to get to the South Pacific any more. There is only one flight there from Honolulu each week on Saturday night, and one flight back on Sunday night. To fit our timing, we would have had to fly from Kauai back to LA in order to take a 14-hour flight to Tahiti and then an inter-island flight to our island of choice. Add that hotels on Bora Bora range from $800 to $3,000 a night, and it wasn’t looking like such a great spot to us. (Said Ed, “For $3,000 a night, I should bathe in gold, and I don’t even want to bathe in gold.”)

Okay, now where? Spin the globe? Back to MT Sobek. Well, there was an Arctic explorer trip that looked pretty exciting, and the dates fit, but that wasn’t going to be a comfortable trip in a bikini. Hmmm…

When Ed and I were planning our first holiday together, he sent me some links to look at. One he said wasn’t really the right place for that trip, but it looked cool, and he wanted me to check it out. It was for a place called Ladera, on St. Lucia in the Caribbean. The rooms are built into the side of a forested cliff, with only three walls each – the fourth wall is open to the mountain. The beds are draped with netting, and each room has a private stone walkway, a plunge pool and waterfall. I remember thinking at the time that this place had honeymoon written all over it.

So I asked Ed about it. He was excited – it was a place he’d always wanted to go, and it fit all the criteria we had: warm, exotic, relaxing, special, and more. I checked flights, and while they were long to go the Caribbean, no more so than our South Pacific trip would have been. He said, “Go ahead and book it.”

Except I couldn’t. They were full for all of our dates. Now what? Our friends Kirk and Heidi live on their sailboat, and have several times chartered boats to sail around the Caribbean. After their most recent trip, Heidi came back raving about their new favourite place. This had potential.

Heidi said she didn’t think the place would be right for our honeymoon – they like it because it’s very casual and relaxed (sounds good) and very yachty and filled with boaters having a good time (maybe not the right place after all).

Not to lose hope – Heidi and Kirk and their families have cruised around the islands and visited many places that would be great honeymoon spots. She put together a list complete with names of places, URL links, and mini-reviews saying why they liked each place. Wow! We had our own personal travel agent who had actually been to the islands and hotels, someone with taste we can trust.

So research-girl (yours truly) checked all of them – one stood out. We looked for flights – they lined up. We asked about availability – we had our choice of suites. So we pressed the GO button. Not quite like the EASY button, because this wasn’t quite that, but it’s good all the same.

We have a honeymoon!

After our wedding we’ll be heading to the Caribbean island of Mustique. Mustique is part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, at the south end of the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles. Yes, we’ll be there during hurricane season; however, the island is so far south that they rarely see any effect from tropical storms. It’s basically just a stone’s throw from Venezuela. Okay, a large boulder. Thrown by Atlas.

We’ll be staying at the Cotton House “resort”. It’s made up of only 20 suites and rooms in several buildings on what was a cotton plantation in another era. We have the upper floor of a building at the furthest edge of the property from the main building, with our own veranda opening out to the Caribbean and a private plunge pool.

There are three restaurants on the island, two hotels (Firefly has just four rooms), and a small boutique or two. We are told that Mick Jagger has a house there, as do Elton John and several other notables. LeAnn Rimes has been known to show up to play piano at Firefly’s bar.

We hope they’ll leave us alone. It’s our honeymoon after all.