The Universal Honeymoon

Honeymoon in Italian translates viaggio di nozze. Most literally, it means wedding travels or the trip of the wedding. I prefer this translation for I believe it can mean two very different things. One meaning is the most obvious and literal, the actual honeymoon where the bride and groom ride off into the sunset for a resort in Mexico. The other meaning is a trip that combines wishes and dreams into a matrimony with reality. It is the trip that we all hold dear, the one we place on this shelf until at some point in time we take it and go.

 

We circled the purchase button as though we were circling the earth. Whipping across oceans and lands far away in the simple click of a button is as intimidating as it sounds. Anyone who has ever purchased a big flight knows this circling the globe in a click. It validates the journey in a second and yet it can seem like it takes a lifetime to get there. Every time I travel, I am excited. However, there are certain types of travel that bubble up a whole different level of excitement. This excitement is rare. It has been a long time since I took a journey with this level of anticipation. It might sound ungrateful, but there are places I dream of, places I don’t know why I am compelled to go, but I am.  They are always on my list and for whatever reason I don’t get there. I hold them in this dream and wait, wait for the moment for the track-pad to bounce back, validating the journey with a click.

It might bore the person who has been everywhere, but my dream trip has long been seeing a place that I have only imagined and experiencing another, again, that my imagination just couldn’t catch up with on my first visit. For me, a honeymoon should be a journey in between these dreams, in between the place that I can only imagine and the place that exceeds it. Those two places happen to be Greece and Sicily. Again, the destinations might seem too small or too large for someone else’s imagination, but that is what is so endearing about these types of travels. The individual has so much say in travel and then no say at all. We have dream travels and actual travels.

 

We all have these trips in our minds. Whether we take them is another story. We might fill up the calendar with trips that we are excited about, but not to the level of the imagined trip. Nothing can compare to those emotions. You know when you are about to conquer the dream compared to just jumping into a regular journey. Sometimes I think we keep the fantasized travels at bay for a variety of reasons. We are waiting for that right combination of person, time and action.

 I kept Greece as my dream trip for reasons that I can’t explain. It was too hard to get to or to expensive to reach. I have had the choice to travel wherever and whenever I want. And yet, it was always the place that I kept in my imagination. It seems that travelers do this all too often. They build up the idea, keeping it on a list to cross off later. And when it comes time to cross it off so to speak, we have to confront reality. Did it live up to the vision or fall short? This question haunts the traveler so much so that rather than seizing the dream, we keep it on the shelf so it can live in our imaginations most beautifully.

Like the next person, I don’t want to be disappointed on my honeymoon. I don’t think Greece will disappoint me, but just in case it does, I have back up. The place I dreamt about at 20 years old was beyond my imagination. Sicily proved to be an island that I would never forget. It filled up my imagination until it burst. You can’t expect every aspired journey to live up to what you have created in your mind. Sicily however did in a way that I could imagine. I ache for a place  that gives me utter excitement again. It is exciting in that it is too good for our imaginations.

 

The whole point of this rant about the universal honeymoon perhaps has no point at all other than this. We can wish up these places, put them in our imaginations and file them away as just that. Or we can save our meetings with the dream for something special. No matter how long it takes to meet the hope, at least it is always on the table. I’m going toward my dream trip in September because I know just how inspiring those trips can be. I need a trip that will inspire me again. Like my travels to Sicily at 20, the rare excitement for a place, the unique time when a destination exceeds our imaginations is the very reason to pursue the travels of your dreams. You might not have a bride or a groom, but you don’t need them to take my translation of viaggio di nozze, a trip that marries our dreams with reality.

Do you have a dream trip that you haven’t quite made a reality?