This is a story of empty victory, of disillusioned success. I have my Nest controlling an old heater now, and it works well, yet I don’t feel proud of the journey I took to bring it to life.
To spread my shame, thus lightening its’ load on my chest, I’m detailing my path to serve as a cheaters guide to other automation enthusiasts who want to eliminate risk from their lives more than they already have. And maybe I’ll learn something about myself along the way.
Being stubborn, over-confident and limited on funds, we decided to plan our own wedding. We heard a lot of advice from others, ignored it like others, and ended up with more advice to give. And we present it here, for future couples to ignore!
There are so many distractions with modern industrialized weddings that you can get into trouble quickly if you don’t remember your goals. Our main goal was to have great pictures. That’s it. Everything revolved around that. We figured that we would get old and forget what the heck happened anyway, but if we have pictures of us having a great time, we’ll remember having a great time regardless of actual outcome. Comparing the hours spent at the actual wedding with the lifetime hours spent remembering it, we decided to focus on the latter and we suggest you do too.
The increasing humanity around us was very noticeable as we traveled from Turkey to Greece. The humanity of Vietnam was overwhelming. The first thing we noticed when we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, AKA Saigon, was that there were no empty chairs. Every space, and especially seat, was occupied by a person. We didn’t get out of the airport until 10 PM, but it was just boiling with activity. Maybe 10 PM is a popular airport time, but the growth of Vietnam is undeniable.
It took a few connections to get from Kayseri, in the middle of Turkey, to the island of Santorini, so we had time to do a little reading about where we were going.
Santorini as we see it today is basically the aftermath of a collapsed volcano that erupted with great force [7] about 3500 years ago, possibly ending a civilization 45 miles to the south in Crete, but also creating some very cool geographic features that we get to enjoy today. The island has high, steep cliffs that sharply drop into the Aegean Sea, and the middle of the volcano structure can still be seen popping out of the ocean from the remaining eastern semi-circle where all the people live. We booked a spot at the top of the crescent shape in a town called Oia, pronounced EEE-a. The nicest hotels were built on the inward facing cliffs with dug-out caves for rooms, which have amazing views, but all the beaches are on the backside of the island that gently slopes into the sea. At some point the government had mandated that all the houses need to be white, and the resulting contrast with the blue church domes made the spot great to photograph.
This is a hastily slapped together summary of our honeymoon. We wrote it for family, friends, and our future selves. It turned out way longer than we wanted, but we didn’t have the time to make it shorter! If you enjoyed it, check out Part 2 and Part 3 as well!
Having dated for a few years, been engaged for almost two, and making it through a wedding planned from the other side of the country, Erin and I felt like we needed to celebrate.
For some reason, the first vacation you take after your wedding is called a honeymoon [1], and we somehow managed to both get four weeks off of work to kickstart our marriage.
With two weeks until Thanksgiving, and miraculously free work calendars, Erin and I finally decided to take that week and go visit San Diego. We had tentatively planned a fishing trip and a dinner already, and decided to pull the trigger. Erin casually asked a few friends at work if there was anything in San Diego that we couldn’t miss, and a particularly well-traveled friend suggested that if we had a whole week + weekends, we should just do Spain and Morocco instead! Northern Africa wasn’t on our short list (nor our long list) of places to visit, but a quick Google search confirmed it was very popular, it was served by Star Alliance, and it somehow didn’t require a visa. So we went ahead and booked it!
We decided to fly into Marrakech, and out of Madrid seven days later. No real time to plan, so we would just hope for the best!