It’s been a little over two years since my wife and I embarked on the trip of a lifetime. We spent nearly all of December 2019 in Southeast Asia on an incredible mega-honeymoon. I talk about this trip a fair amount in real life, and for good reason. The whole experience was absolutely amazing! And with as great of an experience as it was, I thought I might write about it too.

Now, I’m not here to just brag about a great experience I’ve been fortunate enough to have had. If you want to travel to Southeast Asia, you’ll find a bunch of recommendations, planning, and travel tips right here! Maybe you’re planning your own honeymoon, and you are looking for ideas — look no further. I’m not selling tour packages — I’m just here to tell you how we had a great time, and how you could too.

This post is more of an overview of the behind-the-scenes stuff that made it all happen. I promise I’ll write about our travel experiences in the future, and when I do I’ll update this post with links!

This is the first post of a multi-part series describing some of my favorite travel adventures. I’ll write segments periodically, interspersed with other weekly posts.

The Couple That Travels Together…

My wife and I both independently loved traveling before we were married. She had spent a fair amount of time in Africa before we met, and I had visited different parts of Europe a couple of times. We knew that we both valued our travel experiences highly, and we wanted travel to be a part of our story.

As we planned our wedding, the time came to start creating a gift registry. As we looked through options, we realized that we were both relatively well established and had been living on our own for a good while. Between the two of us, we already owned almost all of the traditional wedding registry “stuff.” We had pretty much everything we needed to start our life together. This combined with our love for travel gave birth to another idea.

Through some researching, we discovered Traveler’s Joy, a honeymoon registry website, and quickly decided that this was the right path for us. The website provided an easy way for people to contribute financially to our honeymoon as their wedding gift for us. It also gave us plenty of ideas for destinations and activities which people could direct their gift towards. Between the money we received as wedding gifts for our honeymoon and our personal contributions, we set a budget of $5,000 for the whole month-long trip. The next challenge was deciding where and when to go.

Where And When We Went

We knew we wanted to take as much time for traveling as was practical, while considering our work schedules. Working in the aerospace industry has a few perks when it comes to travel — the company I work for takes off the week between Christmas and New Year’s, as do many others in the industry. I had saved up my vacation time for a while as well, and had three weeks’ worth of time available. My wife’s work was very flexible with her, so her job wasn’t as much of a factor in the timing of things.

Traveling in the winter helped us narrow down our choices a bit, because we (okay, mostly my wife) wanted to go somewhere warm. So we spent a morning at a coffee shop dreaming about all of the places we could visit. Eventually, we came across the prospect of visiting Southeast Asia. Between being tropical, amazingly affordable, and safe for travelers, it seemed like a perfect fit.

My wife and I had both heard great things about Thailand from friends who had visited. With its reputation for being welcoming to tourists and yet still authentic, the “Land of Smiles” was definitely going to be on our list. We also had friends who had visited Malaysia in the past and had had a wonderful time. I thought it would be amazing to spend New Year’s Eve in Singapore. And I’ll never forget the look on my wife’s face when Bali entered the conversation. All of these destinations, strung together carefully, ended up making our Southeast Asia honeymoon exactly what we hoped for.

How to Get There

I’m the logistics-minded person in our marriage, so when we travel I’m responsible for getting us from Point A to Point B, and figuring out where we’re staying. I love the challenge and process, but it took me days to find flights for the trip. I spent hour upon hour trying every different combination I could think of for city pairings and dates. Where was it cheapest to fly into and out of? What if we visited one city (or country) before another? Could we save money that way? I was booking this trip before I knew a lot about reward points and miles, so those additional challenges weren’t a factor, but there were still a lot of things to consider.

I ended up booking an “open-jaw” ticket (a ticket on which your arrival city on your outbound leg is different from your departure city on your return leg) through United Airlines. The routing took us on United from home to Chicago, then on ANA (All Nippon Airways) from Chicago through Tokyo to Bangkok, where we would start the trip. The return leg was also on ANA, from Singapore through Tokyo to Houston, then home on United. I then connected the dots between the rest of our destinations.

Some of those dots were more challenging to connect than others! I booked flights on AirAsia to get us between countries (Chiang Mai to Penang, Kuala Lumpur to Bali, and Bali to Singapore). But travel around and through each country, I found out, really needs to be booked when you’re already there. The planner in me wanted to have everything figured out, but I could use a lesson in going with the flow too!

Can We Skip To The Good Part?

I really enjoyed the challenge of planning our Southeast Asia honeymoon. But of course the best part was actually getting to go! My wife and I had an incredible time from the moment we left our home. There were so many incredible experiences, people, sights, foods and smells on the trip that I certainly can’t describe them all. But I can’t wait to share more about the amazing trip in future posts. For now, I’ll leave it with a pillow that was in one of our hotel rooms in Bali…