Why It's Important, On The Big Day, To Do It My Way.

        This time next week, I'll not be sitting at my computer, writing. In fact, I'll probably be fast asleep, ready to start attempting to cope with 30°c heat in Buffalo, New York, having experienced the hell that is driving out of Manhatten. This will be because on Saturday, it's my turn to go through the ritual that is getting married. See, we looked at TV programmes like Bridezillas and thought this was both hilarious and stupid in equal measures. The idea of treating a budget as a fancy word for "receipt", and not the amount you have to throw around, seemed crazy. I mean, a friend of Mrs Max spent £5 on invites for her wedding a few months ago. Now let me clarify that. That's not £5 for all her invites: it's £5 per invite. Each of the 135 people attending had one posted to them. Why would you spend this sort of money on an invite? And I wouldn't expect to pay £80 per head unless I was at the Ritz, so you can imagine i spent a lot of time reattaching my sides after reading the price list for most caterers. Apparently, the "W" word seems to send the digits spinning on the till, and since most of their customers are too busy choosing between the pink or the purple bouquets to go with their new teeth to notice a handful of flowers are £60, then I don't really blame them, but since starting life with a new ring, accompanied with enough debt to buy a 2011 Mercedes Benz isn't my idea of a brainwave, we stayed well away.

        So instead of saving for months on end to pay for one day, we've simply decided to cut out all the hassle and instead spend it on the bit that comes the next few days after the wedding day: the honeymoon! To some, the idea of a honeymoon is to get a long weekend away in the Highlands of Scotland before they drive back down, always seemingly in the rain, to get on with their normal lives with their jobs to be able to start making repayments on their wedding day. This seemed totally backwards to me: why are you working to repay a £20k debt that was blown on a single day to ensure that vast swathes of your family, most of which you hold in a level of contempt that's just above Stalin or those people who drive on windy country roads at 40mph, get to stuff their faces on cake and canapes and dance like a paraplegic being held up by four cattle-prods, only then to find they've got just enough left over at the end to pay for the fuel to Edinburgh and a couple nights' stay in a 2* B&B. So, with Mrs Max having heaped the task of "honeymoon planning" on me, I started racking my brains for the most audacious and memorable time ever. After much browsing the Internet, making suggestions, dismissing whole continents and drawing a chart to illustrate the sizes of spiders per country, we settled on the best plan I think we've ever come across.

       Now, I should probably point out that I tend to have really bad luck with flying to places. For example, you are told to get to the airport three hours before you depart. Now, they tell you that this is because of checks, security etc, but that's total rubbish. It's because of people like me. On one fateful trip, a u-turn was needed in the airport car-park because my passport was sitting in the front pocket of my bag, which wouldn't be so bad if my bag wasn't sitting on my bedroom floor. Then there's the flight from Singapore to Australia, where I was so amazingly ill that in the 40 minutes I managed to get something you could call "sleep", I'd sweated so much that my t-shirt was as wet as one you'd just lifted out of a bucket of water. Fine if you can swan over to Matalan and pick up a new one, not so fine in an airport. You'll often see me sitting in my seat before taking off (and before the four hour delay, because it's me), hoping that I'm going to be stuck in the aisle seat next to the pensioner who needs to go to the lavatory every fifteen minutes rather than the lady with the baby. It always turns out to be the lady with the baby. That, or the pensioner who doesn't even bother with the lavatory any more. Now Mrs Max isn't immune from this, like the time in Los Angeles airport that she left both our passports in the confectionary store. On top of a box of Maltesers. For an hour. I'd only noticed them because I was so unbelievably bored that I rationed by shop browsing, and they happened to be first. My Step-dad has a black credit card that, for some reason I've yet to work out, lets him use the 1st class lounge at BAA airports. Hurrah, I thought, until I discovered that we're flying out of Terminal 5: the terminal where the builders were so busy getting everything hopelessly wrong that they didn't have time to get a 1st class lounge wrong as well, so they just skipped it altogether.

        Now for most people, a honeymoon normally involves a hotel bill that is rivalled only by the wedding bill. Sure, some hotel suites are sort of nice, and the Rolls Royce Phantom to pick you up is ok, but is it just me, or does anyone else find hotels a bit..... well, impersonal? That forced smile they hold whenever they do anything? Plus, I find that meeting new people and whatnot is where most of the fun of a trip lies. For example, when me & Mrs Max went travelling a few years ago, our first place was a massive 4* place in Bangkok because, well, I don't really know why. It just was. it also was just £10 a night, because that's how Thailand rolls. Anywhoo, as nice as a pool and a spa and room service and as many clean towels as I could dry my hair with was, it was maybe 10% as fun as the hostels we stayed in around the world. I mean, they're dirt-cheap and running low on saunas and massage attendants, but everywhere you turn is a new person with a fantastic story to tell about themselves or where they've been before there. Then, someone pulls out a guitar and everyone has a singalong. Unless it's Wonderwall, in which case they sit in that place of contempt to keep the communist and the  slow driver company. The fancy hotel was full of families that didn't want anything to do with the likes of us, because they only wanted to spend time together. Good for them, but I'll pass. So we have done the best thing we could do with the money we're not spending on a suite in a hotel: hiring a car. And when I say car, I don't mean a small compact to ferry us around. No, I mean a Ford Mustang! Why stay in one place for a week when you can stay in lots of places. In five weeks. While feeling like Steve McQueen for most of the time!

        It's the best idea I think we've had regarding this. We've managed to ignore the pressures and "helpful advice" from both family members and society. We've ignored the suggestion that you need X and Y (normally suggested by whoever's selling them), and you need the biggest dress/venue/food bill you can, because what's love if it doesn't have tens of thousands of pounds attached to the day? We've spent as little as possible on one day, knowing full well that everyone will have just as good a day as if we pick-pocketed the Queen and blew the contents on candelabras and fine dining. Then, we're going to go off and have the absolute trip of a lifetime with the difference.

        Because everyone will tell you it's about the couple, when they are happy for it to be about everyone else but.

Pictures courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

Tweet