Mooning

There is something about the word mooning that makes me chuckle.  Even the word "honey" in front of it cannot erase this image from my mind:

Fine, tasteful, art by yours truly.

Ok, maybe not that exact image, but one similar. However, I am going to (attempt) to put my third grade sense of humor aside to tell you about the very exciting honey moon Mr. Aardvark has planned!

First let my say a HUMONGOUS thank you to my soon to be Aardvarks-in-law. The mister's parents have a time share in Hawaii and it's one of those cool ones where you can swap around and stay pretty much anywhere in the world. And, being the amazing people they are, the offered it to us as a wedding gift! Pretty darn amazing!

Well, as soon as we got the catalog our little minds kicked into overdrive. The world was quite literally open for us to explore. Mr. Aardvark quickly drew up a list of criteria for us. (I should note, I put Mr. A in complete and total control of the honeymoon and all of the planning.)

~Someplace neither of us has been
~Someplace you cannot drive to (in his mind this meant physically drive to and included all of South America and Canada.)
~Someplace where we can get a passport stamp
~Someplace with great food
~Someplace not too hot because both of us get crabby when it's too hot.

Our heads were swimming with ideas of far off places like Cypress (my first choice) or Thailand or the Canary Islands or Madagascar! We would get really excited about one place and then find another, even more exciting, exotic place.

I should note here that, with both of our jobs, we had a week for our honeymoon. More would have been amazing, but honestly I am grateful to have any time at all!

At about the six month mark we started looking into airlines to go to these places and realized it would be at least a day of travel each way. That, plus time changes, plus the fact that we wanted to at least have a little bit of our post wedding brunch (aka not leave a 5am on Sunday) meant our honeymoon would not really start until Tuesday. And since we needed a day to drive from Michigan to Wisconsin on Sunday following our moon, we'd need to leave our exotic paradise on Friday (or in some cases Thursday!).  On top of all that, the tickets were not cheap. 

While we would love to be able to tell people we were honeymooning in Cypress, was it worth it to have only three days there? On top of that, would we really get to know the culture of the place or the people if we were staying at a beautiful, fancy, resort? Do we want grand adventure after the stress of wedding planning?

The answer to all of the above questions was N-O.

We would love to go to all of the places above, but ideally, we would go for more than a week and go for more action adventure and less R & R. We briefly contemplated staying in our own timezone and going WAY south or WAY north, but decided to heck with it. What we really want is easy. No currency change, not language barrier, nothing but hanging out and being married.

With this direction change Mr. A found an amazing place in the mountains of central California. However, this place was booked solid so he shifted is focus and found an even more amazing place in Oregon.

We will be staying at The Pines in Sunriver. There are tons of things to do outside, we will be there in April which means there may be some winter like activities. Crater Lake is just a hop skip and a jump away. It is really perfect. Enough of hearing me blabber on though! How about some pictures?!

Image from Western CPE

Image From Travel Video News

Can you say breathtaking?! As for wear we are staying, The Pines looks so cozy and beautiful!

Image from Diamond Resorts

Cozy no? And check out the spiral staircase! Also fire places and decks! I am relaxed just looking at it!

Image from Diamond Resorts

And right on the river! Ohhh I am Sososososo excited. I think this will be wonderful. And wonderfully us.

Where are you going on your honey moon? Did you totally have a change of plans? Can you recommend any great places to eat near Sunriver?