The surprise honeymoon trip

I’d been planning our honeymoon months before the wedding was to happen. If she was going crazy over the details of our, or as she keeps reminding me “her” big day, then I was going to plan a really special honeymoon.

“Where are we going for the honeymoon? And why are keeping it a secret?” she said with a big smile.

“You just worry about ‘your’ wedding dear, leave the honeymoon fireworks to me.”

“Hawaii? Australia? (gasp) What about Thailand, I’ve never been there?!”

“You can’t plant ideas in my head that easily. This isn’t Inception.”

I wasn’t going to let her in on what I was planning but her inquisitiveness meant that I was under pressure. A lot of pressure.
Whatever I do, I have to impress her otherwise keeping this a secret wasn’t going to work if when we reached the airport she was disappointed with where we were going. And I had no intention of allowing that disappointment to come to fruition.

Throughout the months leading up, she’d enquire and generally rummage through my stuff, look on my laptop and check my gmail app for any e-mails. After all, what was mine was soon going to be hers.

“Seriously (in a mock despairing voice), by making this a secret you’re just making me more interested in where we’re going to go, you do know that, right?

“Yep.”

“And you’re still going to keep this up?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll found out soon enough.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that.”

To keep her distracted, and to make this “game” more playful, I started leaving brochures to different places lying around the flat. The Bahamas, South America, Greece and Thailand, I just left littered around the house, not in the most obvious of places, but I knew if she saw it she wouldn’t be able to help herself. I even marked specific pages just so I could make the ruse even better.

One day, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, she said to me “I vote for Thailand” and then left grinning.

I’d already booked the flight. I was sweating a bit because she had to like it, she couldn’t be disappointed by it.

So when the wedding was over and we left with the guests trailing in our wake; we picked up our bags and headed for the airport.

She asked, “Where are we going?” I took the tickets out of the envelope and showed the destination, Lebanon. “We’re going back home,” I said.

We stayed at Moevenpick Hotel and Resort in Beirut. If I ever have to have another honeymoon (I hope not!) it would never better this one.