The honeymoon we always wanted to make
Heads-up: This is a more personal post than usual - Talking about planning my honeymoon. And it's quite lenghty as well :)
Shortly after my fiancé and me got engaged, we started talking about our honeymoon. As we like holidays in the united States very much, it was pretty obvious were we'd be going. As we had already seen the east coast and Texas, we have to see the west coast. California - that's were we're going! Dates were fixed quickly - just after the big event.
We have a knack for doing road trips so that was settled as well. But were would we be going? We collected quite a bit of tipps from friends and colleaques and made up our minds. SF-Napa-Yosemite-Death Valley-Las Vegas-San Diego-Los Angeles-Santa Barbara-Carmel - That'd be the trip we were taking!
Were do we start and were do we finish? This was a decision we made primarily from our flight tickets. (remember, we got engaged in September and were talking about the trip by end of September). We scoured the internet for cheap flights to either SFO, LAX or LAS. January we scoured our deal: 550EUR per person for flights to/from LAX with seating and luggage.
(We looked through Kayak, expedia, Lufthansa & more in addition to "cheap flight"-pages like the german Urlaubspiraten on a daily basis to check for cheap flights. (I did setup an "intelligent alert" for the airport tickers on RSS-Feeds from those pages in my feedreader to get notified about possible deals).
January I got an alert that LOT (polish airlines) has a sale - One thing we were looking for in a flight that is with a stopover was that we'd have good flight times - 2h stopover were perfect. FLIGHT BOOKED.
Now we have a flight and a route. Next up - rental car. Looked through all the usual rental car agencies but stuck with Sixt as I use them in germany and like their pricing in the US. Not booking at the airport station but at a city station saved us approx. 300USD here - invested in a bigger car of course.
Flight check, route check, car check - time to look for stays. Our usual goto is either AirBnB or random 4/5-star hotels. Glancing through the usual hotel comparison pages like Kayak, expedia, booking and similar made it obvious that hotel rooms in SF, SB, LA are kinda expensive - So we started taking a closer look at AirBnB. Rooms (or rather small houses as we prefer to be on our own) were quickly found - a good mix of value and size.
For San Diego we went for a resort (San Diego is our first stop after arriving and we wanted a resort to have some days to wind down). Another Must that we decided on was to stay in something famous in Las Vegas - So we went for staying in the Bellagio!
All the booking basically stops here as most is booked now. But we took a look at some "experiences" and got us some via AirBnB (Snorkel event in San Diego) and some via viator (helicopter flight above LV at night? Hell yeah!)
Next post will be about the budgeting part.
Image Source; Pixabay