Today is our one year anniversary which seemed a fitting time to get my butt into gear and finish my write up of our honeymoon trip. Tim is much more on top of things and wrote his right after the trip. You can check it out here 13 days and 3,410.9 miles *Part I*
Sitting on the garage’s hot concrete floor in the middle of a Phoenix summer, drenched in sweat, I was dreaming of a cool ocean breeze.
We had recently purchased, my husband's childhood dream car, a 1988 Porsche Carrera 911. It needed a lot of TLC and we were running on a deadline (our honeymoon).
Rewind to when Tim, my then fiance, mentioned the exact Porsche he had dreamed about was up for sale. This was not the first time I had heard about the little air cooled vehicle and I was well aware of how much he loved it - and now there was one for a decent price nearby. My first question was “why not?”
We were trying to decide what to do for the honeymoon (the most important part of getting married right?). After seeing the little black Porsche my mind instantly flashed to us driving up the coast, a vision I used as one of the selling points (like he needed any?). “How cool would it be to take this on our honeymoon?!” and that was that. It was decided we would be driving up the coast in an old sports car.
Now, here I was, during the hottest most miserable months of the year, elbow deep in grease assisting with the valve adjustment, becoming more and more attached to this little car. We spent our weekends and evenings fixing, cleaning, and prepping the Porsche for the big adventure (we really did spend more time on the car than we did on planning our actual wedding).
Side note: All of our vehicles have names and this one was no exception since Tim’s love for this car was born from a (bad) 80’s movie called Condorman, Condor seemed a natural choice - and it stuck.
Now that we had the car and an idea of where to take it. We talked about a more solid plan for the honeymoon...and after approximately one day of trying to plan we gave up, sent out a map to our friends of the general route we had in mind, and let them have free range to add anything they thought was worth a stop. When we opened up the map a week or so later we were blown away at what everyone had added (destinations, food, places to stay) it was amazing. Now anywhere we found ourselves along the way we could pull up all of our friends suggestions and go from there. And that was the extent of our planning.
We had a vehicle, a general route, and a no plan plan, which made us want to take about two months off. We both agreed that there was no better excuse to take time off than our honeymoon, so we took full advantage, sadly for us that was just two weeks and not two months. In hopes of squeezing every bit of extra time off we planned around the Thanksgiving holiday maximizing our days off without actually using vacation days.
Now we had a no plan, plan and a time limit. The date on the calendar seemed to take forever to arrive and also came too quickly.
Last but not least we had to pack which proved to be the third most involved prep we found ourselves doing. We usually travel in our Land Cruiser, Goose, where space is not an issue. Turns out when traveling in a Porsche space and weight are things you must consider. We decided to pack like we were backpacking. We sacrificed things we usually have in the Land Cruiser knowing that while driving up the coast we would not be far from services at any given time. For example we did not take a fridge but a cooler bag, we packed light knowing we would hit laundry somewhere, we did not take much for cooking, planning to eat mostly things that did not require much prep (we ate a lot of salami and cheese), and we planned on tent camping.
With all this in mind we packed up Condor the night before our official departure date. Tim drove Goose to work and Condor sat in the garage ready to roll. Goose was like a sad puppy who knew he would not get to come along on this adventure. I think it is safe to say both our minds were somewhere else that whole day at work! We were like little kids waiting for Christmas morning - we could not wait to hit the road.
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