Since our one year wedding anniversary is in two days, I thought I would share our honeymoon with y'all. I had this post on my old blog, but I wanted to bring it to my new one for those of you who are new around here.
I feel like it wouldn't be us if something bad didn't happen, honeymoon included. To start off, we missed our very first flight. FYI, when they say get there 2-3 hours ahead, get to the airport 2-3 hours ahead. Thankfully an amazing woman at the Atlanta airport helped us out and not only got us a later flight the same day, but was able to upgrade us. Then our last of 3 places, everything that could go wrong did. BUT we had an amazing time and I can't wait to tell y'all about it!
So if you have been following me for a while you probably already know where we went on our honeymoon, but if you are new, we went to Italy! We have always wanted to go there for our honeymoon, but I feel like it was one of those dream destinations that would never happen. Turns out it isn't outrageously expensive. I was thinking of somewhere tropical like Hawaii or Turks and Caicos because I love the beach and that sounded wonderful to just relax on a beach for two weeks, but those places were pretty expensive. So while we were looking we decided to just check and see what Italy would cost and it ended up being few hundred dollars more for almost double the time. So we picked a package with 3 different cities and started planning.
We decided to go to Rome, Florence, and Venice. Rome was hands down our favorite. It may have even spoiled us a little, because to us none of the other cities compared. The first picture down below was our hotel in Rome. We loved it there. There was something wrong with our shower and when we told them about it the next day they upgraded our room for the inconvenience. We didn't even care about the shower but we weren't going to complain about an upgrade.
Each stop we took a train to the new city. We took a train from Rome to Florence and from Florence to Venice. While we were in Florence we took a day trip to Tuscany. It was so beautiful there! We stopped quite a few places on this trip, Pisa, San Gimignano, and Siena. Siena was neat because they have different districts and they are represented by different animals like an owl, unicorn, eagle, to name a few. I think there are 12 total. You have to wear a scarf with your colors on it so people know which district you are from. There is also a horse race they have twice a year with one horse representing each district. We were able to visit where they do the races, and they were preparing for it while we were there. A couple of days later we saw to the race on TV. We even climbed to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
We ended up doing quite a few tours and we should have listened to everyone that said not to. We felt they were a rip off and would have had a better time touring by ourselves. We know now though in case we ever go back. We still did some exploring on our own and I'm so glad we did that.
Our last stop of the trip was Venice and it was a disaster from the beginning. We had trouble as soon as we got there with our hotel. We finally got that sorted out about 4 hours after arriving in Venice and we were hoping that was the end of our bad luck, wrong. The next day our private food tour was turned into a group tour, so we canceled and they refunded our money. Our second tour of the day ended up being a shared gondola ride with 2 other couples and then we couldn't find our restaurant for dinner. We ended up having to ask someone where it was and when we finally find it there were only 4 things to choose from to eat. On the last day we are hoping it was over but that would be too easy. Our last tour of the trip was a waste. I didn't learn anything and she talked way too much about unimportant things. We get back to our room after a long day of walking outside in the hot sun to find no hot water. We had just decided to take one in the morning before we went to the airport and no hot water when we woke up either.
I was pretty upset because I was so excited about Venice. I love water and I have always seen the romantic gondola rides, but I guess my expectations were too high. We did end up going on a gondola ride by ourselves though, and that was waaayy better. Despite everything that happened in Venice, we still had an amazing time and we would love to go back one day! We are definitely going to be doing things differently if we do go back, but I think it will be better because we will know what to expect and what to do and not to do. I would also love to try and learn Italian if we ever do go back. We were there a total of 9 nights and it wasn't long enough. I miss it all the time!
I hope you enjoyed hearing a little bit about our honeymoon! I could go on and on about it, but didn't think y'all would want to read that much. Let me know if there is anything else you want to hear about while we were there or if you want a part two or a post on each city!
