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I am a teacher and aspiring writer, and keep a blog to keep up with writing and document the daily moments that make up my life. Working with my students & travel writing are my biggest passions. People, art, food, wine/spirits, and culture are other writing interests. Thanks for coming by!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Honeymooners' Dilemma




I know, I know. Some people have real problems. But we have a serious dilemma: where in the world should we take our honeymoon? The factor that is making this decision "difficult" (if you are a pessimist) or "interesting" (if you're an optimist) is that we don't have a whole lot of money we're working with here. Or so we think. We can basically afford the wedding, and that's it. Plenty of people have told us to do a "Honeyfund," which we're seriously considering. It's a website dedicated to a couple's honeymoon plans, and people can contribute to it as a wedding gift if they like. So like I said, that's always an option. If we don't do the Honeyfund, we will be using our frequent flier miles to get to the destination, and we will be using a timeshare that Rob's family is giving us for lodging. Between the frequent flier miles having rules on where we can travel using the miles, and the fact that the timeshares are only in certain places, but not others, especially not the places we can use our frequent flier miles to travel to, it's gotten interesting.
For example, the first place we wanted to take our honeymoon was Belize. But there are no timeshares in Belize. Also, if we use our ff miles going to Belize, it will take 3 flights each way, and as if that's not bad enough, we'd have to spend the middle of the night on a 7 hour layover in Dallas. We thought about Playa del Carmen, which is a place where we could use the timeshare but not the ff miles. We thought about the Caribbean, where we can use the ff miles, but no timeshares. Then there is the Punta Cana, Dominican Republic option. This is Rob's first choice. I have my reservations for 2 reasons: for one thing, the Dominican Republic neighbors Haiti, and with all of the devastation there I feel like if I was there I would feel like I should be helping and not being served cocktails by the pool with not a worry in the world. And the other thing is that Rob just discovered that the company his family has the timeshare with, "Moonpalace Resorts," just sold their resort in Punta Cana to the Hard Rock Cafe conglomerate. Rob would love to spend his honeymoon at the Hard Rock Cafe resort, he said, but somehow it wasn't what I had in mind. I'd love something not quite so commercial. Somewhere we could relax and enjoy, but also be exposed to the local culture, not so far removed from it. So as you can see, we have quite the dilemma, but we need to figure out something soon, before flights and resorts book up completely for the summer. Thoughts anyone???

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