Victory Lap: when an important life milestone comes along, but instead of spending a ton of money on a party or celebration, you spend that same money on transportation to visit people and places. An alternative to an extravagant celebration such as a wedding. Rather than blowing $25,000 or more in a weekend, stretch the festivities into a months-long adventure to travel and spend quality time with friends, family, strangers and each other.
Our Game Plan: Instead of throwing a huge wedding we’ll be taking a year off (hopefully) to travel and visit as many family and friends that we possibly can. Going to each person gives us the opportunity to actually catch up and have a conversation instead of just a quick “Hi, so good to see you! Thank you so much for coming, we’re really glad you’re here, bye!” ALSO, giving us a chance to explore new cities and towns along the way. ALSO, starting our marriage off with an epic adventure to get know the important people in each other's lives. See, we've lived in Hawaii for the majority of our relationship with most of our friends and family on the mainland. It makes it really difficult to get to know these important people being on the other side of the world from them. Our original plan was to trick out a camper van and drive around the states, staying in campgrounds and people’s backyards. BUT, a sailboat in Arthur’s family became available, so we bought the boat! This changes our plans slightly, but we are determined to cover just as much ground, or water, however you want to look at it.
Why we decided to do this: We were engaged for over a year and still had not decided when to have a wedding. We were living in Hawai’i, but both sides of our families were in South Carolina. We wasted many afternoons going back and forth about where to have the wedding and stressing about how much it was going to cost. We started planning our wedding twice! First in South Carolina where the majority of our families live. Downside, we would be planning from halfway around the world and it would be 200+ people, which is a little larger than we wanted (we’re more of the small crowd type). We scratched that idea after a month of looking at the logistics without a wedding a planner. It was going to be way more stress than we wanted and EXPENSIVE! So, we decided we would get married in Hawai’i. It would be much easier to plan a wedding in the town we were living in, and it would be much less expensive, right? WRONG. Thinking about people flying all that way just for our wedding made us want to throw a grand party. I mean they would be flying half way around the world to celebrate with us! They deserve an open bar, killer food, good music. Unfortunately, all of that costs A LOT of money. I was almost in tears adding up what it was going to cost when I looked at Arthur and said “Screw this. We’re having a private ceremony with only our parents and I’m buying us plane tickets to somewhere WE WANT to be with all this money!” In 2017 the average wedding in the US cost over $25,000! The idea of spending that kind of money on a weekend event made us sick to our stomachs! It just didn’t feel right for us on so many levels. I’m a traveller at heart, so I judge every significant purchase by the number of plane tickets I could buy with that money. $25k! We could fly all over the world on that!
Luckily Arthur liked that idea, so we rolled with it until we came up with what we’re now calling our Victory Lap. Getting married is a big deal and we do want to celebrate with family and friends, BUT we also want to travel as much as possible. SO, we are off to travel, mainly by boat, and celebrate all along the way!