Secret Project number Seventeen

 Oh Seventeen, look at you! This week's Secret Project comes from a particularly nagged grad student by the name of Heidi Meredith. Heidi and I met right before school started, at a digital storytelling workshop. Before the three day workshop was over, and we barely knew each other's names, Heidi announced "We're going to be friends!" I didn't know it then, but Heidi was right. 

How to plan a delayed-minimal-stress-maximum-relaxation-economical-european-esc-honeymoon

I got married last September, but since I had to fly back from Washington to California the day after and start grad school, we didn’t get to take our honeymoon right away. Originally, before I decided to go back to school, we were going to go to Canada and/or Alaska for the honeymoon but with the delay the thought of those Northern December temperatures made us think we should head south.

My husband (to-be at that point) said we should go to Buenos Aires.

I hadn’t really ever considered Buenos Aires. I didn’t know much about it. But with some quick googling it began to be the perfect spot. It was warm, inexpensive, great food and a European feel. What’s not to like?
 

 It’s kind of insane to be planning a week to two week long vacation right after planning your wedding. Since the wedding was the “big” thing, the honeymoon was more of... “let’s book a spot and figure out what to do there once we’re there.”

So, to find our hotel I literally googled “hip hotels, Buenos Aires” and there was an article about 5 or so pretty neat looking hotels. The one we stayed at our first three nights was Home Hotel. Boutique-y, well-designed, nice website. Perfect. I emailed them and gave them my credit card for down payment. Done.

For the following week I had heard that renting a house/apartment was a good cheap way to go. My friend Pamela, who is currently planning her wedding, sent me a link to this blog called A Backyard Wedding : http://abackyardwedding.blogspot.com. She had noticed that this couple had gone to BA for their honeymoon and rented a loft.

So I looked checked out her blog, and the the loft she stayed at (called The Loft) looked perfect. http://abackyardwedding.blogspot.com/2009/03/honeymoon-returns.html
So I emailed Angela, who owns The Loft and asked her about availability for December 17-24. Luckily, that week was open and I paid her $100 through paypal up front to hold our spot. For the whole week it was $400 total to stay at The Loft.

For travel fares my husband just put on a Kayak faretracker for BA. He did this in July so we had plenty of time. Prices were high (lots of people go to BA in the winter cause it’s summer there) but finally, in about October, for about a day, the price dipped to about $700 a ticket (it had been over $1,000 for over a month) and we snatched them up.

We were pretty much ready to go now. Like I said, with so much going on in my life (wedding, starting grad school) I couldn’t plan the honeymoon more than to make sure we had a place to stay and a way to get there.

But it worked out perfectly. By the time we went on our honeymoon we’d acquired some guidebooks, and our sense of adventure was in full force.
 

{the hardest part about a honeymoon is there is no one else to take pictures of you together!}

We had a great time in BA. The Loft and is amazing. We loved the tiled kitchen, the avocado green 40s fridge, the spiral staircase, and the ornate elevator.  And Angela, the owner, feels more like a built-in friend than someone you’re renting a space from. We also had a wonderful time exploring the San Telmo neighborhood. We had a pretty much non-existent agenda so the days were filled with eating, drinking, shopping, museum-going, exploring, and more eating and drinking.

And the delay on the honeymoon turned out to be really nice. We got to take almost two weeks (something we couldn’t have done after taking a week off to get married) and we ended up going to BA, which is now one of my favorite places, ever!