Honeymoon - Day 1 - Tahiti

Bora Bora and Tahiti were always on my bucket list of places I wanted to go.  When Joe and I started talking about where we wanted to go, we both agreed it would be a great place to go, but I am not sure either one of us really thought we would do it.  We started doing some research and knew it would be an expensive trip, but made the executive decision that we both have great stable jobs, so why not!  This is a great time to justify spending a bit (or maybe a lot) more than we normally would on a vacation!  We found a luxury travel agent right in Buckhead that we knew would help us plan the honeymoon of our dreams after we had set our budget.    We worked with Christie Carden at Century Travel (www.christiecardentravel.com) and she did such a fantastic job making sure everything was set and good to go for the trip!  After giving them our idea of going to French Polynesia,  they told us that several of the people at the agency had been there, so we knew we were in good hands.  After a lot of research, this is what we had planned...

After a couple of days back at work, would depart ATL airport for LAX. From LAX, we would board a long overnight flight to Papeete. Upon arrival, we will be boarding a ferry to the beautiful Moorea to stay in Vida's lifelong dream, an overwater bungalow! After a relaxing day and night of snorkling off our porch and enjoying the scenery, we head back to Papetee the following morning to board our Paul Gaugin island hopping cruise.

We have a 7 day cruise visiting Huahine, Taha'a, Bora Bora and Moorea. The ship is quite different from our usual Carnival Cruises. The ship only has 150 rooms and a max of 330 passengers. There are several restaurants to choose from each night and everything from wine to tips are included in the cruise. All we have to do is sit back and enjoy paradise!

After discussing our location with others, we realized it is a must to become SCUBA certified. We've been told it's the best diving anywhere in the world and we plan to take advantage of this as much as possible.

We booked the trip months in advance, but as the wedding and honeymoon got closer, we really started doing research on restaurants, places to see, cultural differences, etc.  What we found to be the best was blogs.  We read so many blogs and loved the most detailed ones!  Between the blogs and the help of our travel agent, we really felt like we were going to get the most of our trip.  Because of this, we wanted to make sure that we give others the opportunity to read about our experience and hopefully find it helpful for their trip.  Each morning we were waking up pretty early, so we would sit down and write about the previous day, so that we will never forget the details of our magical trip.   We will post it day by day, but we hope that you find this useful.  Enjoy and let me know if you have questions or need suggestions!

May 1, 2014: Day 1

Our honeymoon started a couple days following our wedding.  It was nice to have some time to unwind before heading out for our big trip.  Thursday we had quite a long to do list before heading to Tahiti.  We hadn’t had much time to pack so we started the morning with packing before Joe headed out to run some errands.  We had to pick up our dive cards, as well as get a GoPro rental, and some groceries before hitting the road.   

Our flight was at 3:10 from Atlanta, so we had a good friend Kayla take us to the airport around 1.  We sat in some traffic and got to our gate right as it started boarding which was great!  We had preferred seating so we enjoyed some extra leg room.  On the flight, I tackled the thank you cards while Joe made a list of what we wanted to spend our wedding gift money on, finished up our wedding budget spread sheet (we ended up under budget!), and studied up on restaurants to go to while we were staying in Moorea.  We landed in LA around 5 PST and collected our luggage since we had booked flights separately.  Since I travel as much as I do, we had plenty of miles to use them to get to LA, but had to buy our tickets from LA to Tahiti because it was an Air France flight.  This was a big mistake because after leaving security, there is currently little food options for dinner at the airport.  We made the trek with all of our luggage to the international terminal only to find out we could not check in until 8 PM!  So, with all of our luggage, we headed to the one café open before security and bought a very overpriced dinner ($15 for a nasty salad).  After eating, we relaxed for a bit and enjoyed the free WiFi before we finally got to check in for our let to Tahiti.  I must say, it was nice only having one lay over on the trip to Tahiti, and once we got checked in, the terminal was beautiful.  We explored for a bit before heading to the gate and relaxing for a bit.  About 30 minutes before boarding we took some NyQuil to help us sleep on the flight, and were glad to finally board even if it was a bit late.  We boarded at 11:30 PST so that was super late for us, but had great seats.  After getting seated, both Joe and I fell asleep before the flight even took off!  We both slept surprisingly well, although we woke up every so often, which we were very thankful for.  About 1 hour and a half before landing, we were awake and ready to go.  Joe enjoyed the breakfast on the plane, and before we knew it, it was time to land!

We realized that this actually was the first time in the 4 years that we have been together that we took a vacation that was just the two of us, and had never been on a flight together!  We travel so much separately for our jobs that I don't think we realized that we had never actually flown together.  We were long overdue for a vacation together, and will definitely make it a yearly thing from now on!