Your Honeymoon – Serious Down-time or Activity Based Bonding Exercise

Ever thought about what style your honeymoon should be? There is plenty of guidance if you want to buy a honeymoon package, or to find out where the top spots for honeymoons are, but have you thought about how you’d like to spend your honeymoon, before zooting off to the Maldives or Mauritius where you can sip endless cocktails under a series of palm trees…

I have friends whose idea of a honeymoon incorporated hiking the Camino, almost all the way. For those of you uninitiated walkers the Camino de Santiago, or The Way of St James, is a pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, north west Spain, where Saint James is supposed to be buried.

It’s more commonly known as ‘one hell of a long walk’.

Despite only coming to the general public’s attention in recent years, the Camino has existed for over a thousand years and was an important Christian pilgrimage during medieval times.

Every year pilgrims and other travellers set out from starting points across Europe to head to Santiago de Compostela. Most walk. Others bike, and some even travel on horseback. Some travel for religious purposes, and others as a challenge. It can take days, weeks or even months to reach the city – it’s up to you.

The point is not to convince you to walk the Camino. Rather it’s to decide on whether post-wedding recuperation should take the form of a challenge that will take you out of yourself and push your endurance, during which your marriage bond will more than cement. Or whether your version of a honeymoon involves being as horizontal as possible.

You can do sun, sea and sand. Or you can do something physical that pushes the boundaries, within reason, but at the same time transports you out of yourself and gives you an experience. Most important is that the honeymoon receives a little thought.

Personally, I’d opt for something mid-way between the two – walk the Camino, but only part way, and then possibly in luxury – skip the dormitories and go for the cosy hotels, at least for a couple of nights.

There’s something about the challenge of pushing the boundaries together that attracts me…