Honeymoon

Our honeymoon was pretty good. We prepaid the hotel, so that was all set and something we didn't have to think about. Some other things didn't work out as well. We planned our flights poorly. We originally wanted to spend a few hours in Honolulu before we flew to the other island. After 12+ hours of flying though, all we wanted to do was get to our hotel. So we decided to change our flight in the airport, and it basically cost us the price of the original tickets. If I had known this, I wouldn't have followed through. Or we just should have planned better in the first place. Our flight back also had a 4 hour layover, but I wasn't about to buy new tickets for that, so we just dealt with it.

I had a quote for the car that was reasonable, but this ended up being way too low. The quote waws for about $220 or so. I then decided to do the "return the car on empty and it's ok" deal. We shouldn't have done this since we ended up barely driving anywhere. Although we left the car with almost a 1/4 of a tank, the gas was only $3.00 a gallon, and we would ahve saved money by not paying the $50 for this deal. Also, we were asked if we wanted to have both of us as drivers. I said yes, but they did not explain that this cost an extra $50. I found this out when we returned the car. Overall, the car cost $100 more than expected.

Before we left we didn't really think much about the price of food. We thought we could possibly be ok with around $700 for activities and food. We were greatly mistaken. We didn't end up doing any activities because the weather was rough most of the time, so a helicopter or boat ride just wouldn't have been fun. But food it self was extremely expensive. Anywhere in the resort area it would cost at least $10-15 for an appetizer, or maybe a burger and fries. Luckily we had free breakfast (well we had to pay gratuity), so I at least tried to fill up on that. My wife doesn't like doing that, so she generally would want lunch later. We eventually set up a simple budget after 2 days, and we almost kept to it. It started to make things less than happy, but we worked through it anyway.

So overall we spent more than expected. Luckily we should be getting a decent amount back from the IRS, and our wedding money will cover at least my spring tuition. I'm not sure how to deal with my summer tuition though. I think we need to readjust our budget a bit, except I'm not sure what else I can take out. I'm sure there's something.

Well this sounds kind of like a blah post, but really, the honeymoon was good. We had a lot of fun, sat by the pool, and enjoyed ourselves without thinking too much about money and consequences. We had some good food, good laughs, good scenes, and decent weather. And we got to see some whales breaching from the beach!