Wheeling

Image of Padova, Italy

Mr. Canary and I booked our honeymoon!!! Well, the most essential part. We had been considering honeymoon options for a long time and knew two things:

1. A very long trip (3 weeks)
2. A super interactive experience. We can be beach bums, but we're pretty A.D.D. so we wabt to do a lot of activities
   

We both love to bike ride. It was even featured on our attendant invites. We're not hardcore by any means so when I stumbled on the Bike Riders travel site, I was ecstatic! It's a mix of everything we want, intimate inns/hotels, engaging tours that include cooking classes and gallery viewings, and best of all you bike to each of your destinations. You can choose tours that suit your level. And you may ask, Why would you want to go on a group tour on your honeymoon? Well, the beauty of it is that even though you start off as a group (maximum of 16 people) you never ride as a group. You're given the destination for the day and you can Tour de France it or take your sweet ass time to get there. So really, you bike separately from everyone else. For those who want a more tailored experience, they also have private tours specifically for certain places you may want to visit that aren't offered as a group tour.

The company is super responsive and even sent us a whole packet with sample itineraries. Their site is super easy to use and the pictures are enough to make you want to get on a plane today! Mr. C and I deliberated for a while and decided there is nothing that is more us... we love trying new foods and seeing new places... but we had to decide where to go since Bike Riders offers tours to so many places all around the world.

Mr. C and I have talked about various destinations, but we always come back to Italy. it's very significant to us. I studied in Padova, Italy for a summer in college and really fell in love with the town. I had visited Italy before, but never really immersed myself in the day-to-day life like I did when living there. I lived with a widow who spoke very little English and her dog Perla. I walked down cobblestone streets and through arcades to get to class. I cooked dinner with my host mom and she taught me Italian words by pointing to various ingredients in the meal. After dinner, I often met with my friends and we laid out in the grassy square in the center of town with bottles of prosecco and yummy Italian snacks recounting our days and planning weekend trips. It was really magical and I felt so blissful. It was one of the happiest times of my life. It was made even more special when Mr. C visited for a week and we traveled to Florence and Ferrara. In Ferrara, we saw one of the best Radiohead concerts performed in an old Italian piazza. I've never rocked out so hard in my entire life! So Italy definitely holds a very special place in our relationship.

One of my wedding fantasies was to rent out a large Italian villa and invite our closest family and friends to a small intimate wedding... but with my large family, picking and choosing invitees would have been difficult.

So instead, we'll opt for an intimate, yet engaging honeymoon in Italy. That doesn't sound like a bad compromise at all! Now all we have to do is get our butts in shape for the tour!

A view of some of the sites we'll be passing on the tour we selected...

{All image from www.bikeridertours.com}

How did you decide on where to go for your honeymoon? Did anyone else decide to do a more interactive/adventure honeymoon?