The Ins and Outs of the Honeymoon Registry

                I’ve got weddings on the brain again.  First, let me qualify this.  I am currently sitting on my couch watching W (the Women Watching Will be Whimpering and Weeping network) as Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz find vacation love in the Holiday, and tomorrow I’m going to buy my first-ever Bridesmaid dress.  Plus, I have a destination wedding group and a handful of honeymoon price enquiries on my desk at work.  Put it all together and you can see where my head is at.   Anyway, it’s got me thinking about the intricacies of registering for your honeymoon, or, as I like to call it the “either be ready to kick your family’s butts into gear or give up on the whole idea” registry. 

             I don’t want to sound cynical, because I’m not.  It’s just not easy watching the crestfallen Bride and Groom’s faces when they come to book their dream honeymoon with the money contributed by their family and friends only to find that instead of Bali they can only afford to go camping for a week.   This has happened with all but one of the honeymoon registries I’ve ever seen, and the reason behind it is simple: to get the best price on a vacation you have to book early, but the vast majority of wedding guests don’t even think about a gift until the night before the wedding.   People are lazy.  And cheap.  Another drawback of the wedding registry is that it gives your guests the added pressure of giving a gift with the price tag still attached – they can’t give too little or they seem cheap, but with the economy being what it is, no one has that much extra lying around anymore, so unless you’re that special they’re not going to break the bank to pay for your vacation.  Consequently, most wedding registries get one, maybe two hundred dollars in them by the time the happy couple has to book their trip.  All the rest of the contributors will try calling the night before/morning of the wedding only to have me tell them to just give the Bride and Groom the cash at the wedding, because there’s no honeymoon left that needs paying for. 

         For all you Brides and Grooms out there, this paragraph is for you.  The honeymoon registry can be an awesome thing, but you have to be prepared to ride your guests like quarterhorses to get them to pay.  The biggest tip I’ve got is to plan ahead.  If you’re throwing your wedding together last minute, do not even bother to register for your honeymoon, because you have to book your honeymoon immediately.  But if, like most engaged couples, you have a year of planning and save-the-dates and details, then you’re golden.  Send out notices and the travel agency’s card with your invitations, and don’t forget to include a contribution deadline.  Two months prior to the wedding is a good time frame – not too last minute, but still a reasonable amount of time for you to book a trip at a decent price.   The week before this deadline, start sending out reminders.  Your agent will help you with this, but just send out a quick email blast, post a notification on your Facebook, and make sure your guests remember that if they miss this date, they should start shopping for an actual physical gift instead.   To go along with this, the Bride and Groom have to keep their expectations realistic.  When caught up in the throwes of wedding fever, it can be so easy to imagine spending your most important vacation ever on an idyllic south pacific island in an overwater bungalow (and it’s always an overwater bungalow in these fantasies) , ignoring the CAD$1000.00 per night price tag because you assume your family will pay for it.  Please, please have a backup, cheaper but still fantastic, plan, just in case you actually have to foot the bill yourself.  You don’t need the last minute panic of re-planning your honeymoon combined with the last minute scrambling for the cash and all the other last minute details you have to sort through. 

        Registering for your honeymoon is a great thing, but it’s not as easy as pointing the little bepper gun at the latest set of butter knives at the Bay.  It takes a bit of coordingation on the part of the the couple, the guests and the agent, as well as a realistic outlook.  If you’ve got all this, your honeymoon is going to be awesome. 

Tags: bride, groom, honeymoon, planning, registry, wedding

You drive like crazy

        It seems like the most convenient thing to do.  Why bother having to sort through bus and train schedules on your trip when you could just rent a car and go where you want when you want?  Hold up there a minute, Skippy, make sure you know what this entails or you could be dealing with more hassle than you’d ever anticipated.  If you’re from Canada and heading down to California for Disneyland, for example, then I wholeheartedly encourage a car rental.  You’re familliar with the makes and models of the cars on offer, you know the basic road rules, as they’re the same up here, and you can read the street signs.  These three criteria are not going to be met everywhere, though, so I recommend doing a little online research before you even consider getting behind the wheel. 

    First off, the majority of rental cars internationally are standard transmission.  You need to specify an automatic at time of booking, and be prepared, they’re usually a higher price due to their uniqueness.   So if you can’t drive stick and don’t want to wind up like those Amazing Race contestants repeatedly stalling out in the middle of traffic and enduring the wrath of the locals, you have two options: either practice a bit before going (driving your cousin’s borrowed standard around parking lots for a few hours is so much cooler than learning all the bad hand gestures the hard way on your trip) or cough up the extra cash and get one you can drive.

               Similar to this is the “check which side of the road your chosen country drives on” rule.  I’ve had clients who were perfectly capable of driving standard, but kept missing gears in New Zealand as they were shifting with their left hands while remembering to drive on the right side of the road.  This is also why renting a car in London to drop off in Paris is not possible, as your steering wheel is not going to magically switch sides mid-ferry crossing, and there are a lot of people out there that think the side the wheel is on dictates the side they should drive on.  A client asked me that once, if they could follow the French or the English road rules while in France with an English car.   I am not making this up.  Luckily, I didn’t have a car rental company that would allow him to do this itinerary, so I was spared from having to explain to him that the French don’t like cleaning up after hundreds of tourists killed in head-on collisions near the port of Calais.

      Similarly, if you can’t read the street signs, or understand the basic laws of the road, don’t drive.  When in destination you’re subject to local laws, and ignorance is not a legal defense.  Legal matters aside, by driving yourself you also have to navigate yourself to your destination, so learning the local words/signs for things like “stop”, “road closed” and “if you drive down this road you will be shot”  are a good idea.  I’ll get you started.  “Ausfhart” is German for “Exit”.  There, I’ve just saved you hours of driving down the Autobahn, giggling to yourself and wondering why all roads lead back to the town of Ausfhart while the city you’re looking for never appears.

       Then there’s the little matter of practicality.  Some places it’s actually more inconvenient to have a car than take public transport, particularly if you’re spending a prolonged time in a major city centre.  London is a great example of this, where just driving into the city centre will cost you GBP$7 per day as a congestion charge.  Then there’s the horrendous lack of parking, high traffic congestion combined with the crazy streets that can change names every block or just stop for no reason (not kidding about this, taxi drivers have to study maps and test-drive the city for years before they get their license – passing a test ominously called “the Knowledge”), and when you add it all up it’s enough to have you thrown up your hands in exasperation and abandon your Hertz in the middle of Trafalgar Square in favor of the Underground.  At least on the train you know you’ll eventually wind up at your destination.

      All this being said, a car rental can be a great way to get from one place to another, moving at whatever pace you choose to, as long as it’s under legal limits.  It gives you the freedom to buy that ten-gallon jug of drinking water on sale at Target because you know you don’t have to carry it all the way back to your hotel carefully balanced on your head.  You can reach so many off the beaten path places that major transportation links might not get to.  So rent away – I have some great rates! – but make sure it’s the perfect decision to make your dream trip all you want it to be

Tags: Amazing race, Ausfhart, car rentals, England, France, German, international, London, Tips

Vancouver – Olympic Detox

       OMG, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are over.  They were AWESOME, but they’re done now.  Finished.  Kaput.  Put to bed.  We’ve been prepping for this for the past 10 years,survived the gut-wrenching bid process, the constant traffic disruptions that came with building the new venues and Canada Line skytrain, the protests, the adjusting to the Logo that no one initially liked, the crowds, the incredible excitement, the overwhelming patriotism, the nine-hour line ups for the maple leaf mittens, the best hockey game ever, and the raging hangover from the post-Olympics-and-hockey-game celebrations.  Phew.  Now all us Vancouver (and surrounding area) -ites are left tingling, walking around in a daze and thinking, what’s next?

        First thing Monday morning, assuming you were not one of the 40,000 people trying to fly home from YVR,  the most noticeable change was that there is now nothing on TV again.  That’s one of the fantastic things about the Olympics in general: the 24/7  TV coverage.  You can get up at 6 and catch up on all the short track speed skating and doubles luge action that aired the night before while you were watching the moguls skiing and biathalon.  And here in the lower mainland we had this on not one but four English Channels, as well as French, and occasionally Punjabi ones. Multiply this by 2 if you have HD cable.  Author’s note - If you’ve never watched short track speed skating with an over-excited French commentator, you’re missing out, it’s hysterically funny.  Particularly if you don’t speak French.  But anyway, now we have to watch the same boring crap as always, and it bites.

        And then there’s downtown.  The streets are still busy, but you have to walk down the (gasp!) sidewalkon Robson St. because it’s no longer pedestrian only.  The street performers are gone, too, and we miss the guy in the green skivvies on the giant unicycle already.  Thankfully many of the pavilions, art installations and the wait-in-line-for-two-days zipline are still open thanks to the Paralympics starting on March 12th, so it’s easing us back into regular life slowly, not a sudden  rip-off-the-BandAid jolt.  The biggest difference is that the people walking around are no longer all wearing giant maple leafs on their heads (backs/arms/dogs/children), just a few holdouts still are, and the rest are back in their business formal attire.  Oh, and the line for your Japadog is only half an hour again.

        We’re all kind of numb.  It’s over.  It’s OOOOOOVVVVVVEEEERRRRR!!!!  But it was incredible to have it here, we now have state of the art facilities that will help foster the new crop of Olympians, we have a new appreciation of Curling, and we have the most incredible memories.  We are, now and forever, an Olympic City.  We showed the world how beautiful our scenery and our people are, and, most importantly, showed them how much National pride flows through our veins.  Sorry guys, but Canada isn’t just going to sit by quietly anymore, we’re going to scream our heads off, wear red and white mittens everywhere, and apologize for beating you afterwards.  For that, we thank the Olympics.  They brought us together as a Nation, the home-soil advantage brought us out of our shells, and nobody was more surprised by it than we were.  We always knew our country is the best (I’m more than a little bit biased), but we never really laid it all out there to be seen before. 

Vancouver 2010 Olympics, we miss you.  And we promise to remeber you fondly.

But in the meantime, can you help me find something good on TV again?

Tags: BlogSherpa, Canada, excitement, mittens, Olympics, pride, TV, vancouver, zipline