By: Preston Young
Nobody tells you that planning a honeymoon is a part-time job. They tell you it’ll be fun. They tell you it’s exciting. They say things like “you’re going to have so many great options” as if that’s a selling point and not the root of the problem. Too many options is not a gift. Too many options is how you end up three hours deep into a TripAdvisor rabbit hole at 11pm on a Tuesday, reading a one-star review from 2019 written by someone named Gerald who was upset about the towel service.
I have become Gerald’s student. I have read Gerald’s reviews. I have taken Gerald seriously, and I regret nothing.
When Rachel and I got engaged, I assumed the honeymoon would be the easy part. The wedding has a venue, a photographer, a florist, seating charts, and approximately four hundred other decisions that all somehow feel urgent at the same time. The honeymoon, I thought, would be the reward at the end. Pick a beach. Book a room. Done.
I was wrong in a way that I find genuinely impressive in hindsight.
What followed was weeks of research that I can only describe as a second job I didn’t apply for but showed up to every day. Spreadsheets. Actual spreadsheets. Tabs for different destinations, tabs for different hotels, tabs for pros and cons. I was cross-referencing weather patterns, reading honeymoon forums where people I’ve never met debated the merits of butler service with the intensity of a Senate hearing, and watching YouTube videos of resort room tours like they were must-see television.
After many hours, our starting point was St. Lucia. Beautiful island, strong reputation, made sense on paper. I found a hotel, felt good about it, and booked it. Then I kept reading. The reviews started to shift on me. Nothing catastrophic, just a slow accumulation of doubt, the kind that starts as a small voice in the back of your head and ends with you staring at the ceiling at midnight thinking “but what if it’s not right.” I canceled it.
And because I apparently like to fully commit to decisions before unraveling them, we had also booked our flights to St. Lucia. So when the hotel got canceled, the flights went with it. Which meant starting over there too: refunds, credits, rebooking, and ultimately switching to a completely different airline once we changed destinations.
Round two: still St. Lucia, different hotel. This one had an aesthetic that felt unique, and for a while I was convinced it was the move. Then I found out the rooms had three walls.
Three walls.
To be clear, I understand the appeal. Open-air design, natural breeze, immersed in the environment. Genuinely cool concept. But we’re going in June. It will be hot. And I am not spending my honeymoon sweating through a night’s sleep because a building designer made a philosophical decision about the fourth wall. That’s not romance. That’s camping with better sheets. Canceled.
At this point I had booked and canceled the same destination twice and had nothing to show for it except a very detailed understanding of St. Lucia’s resort landscape, a pile of airline confirmations and cancellations, and a mild sense of defeat.
So I stepped back. Wiped the slate. Asked myself what we actually wanted, not what looked good in photos or ranked well on some listicle, but what would actually feel right for us. Somewhere that felt special. Somewhere with things around it worth exploring, not just a pool and a beach chair for seven days.
That’s how I found Virgin Gorda.
The British Virgin Islands had been floating around the edges of my research for a while, but I kept moving past it because it felt harder to get to, which, I eventually realized, is exactly the point. You don’t just fly in and take a cab. You fly to a larger island and then get on a ferry, and somewhere in that process, you’ve already left the world behind in a way that a direct flight to a resort corridor never quite replicates. The journey to get there is part of it.
And Virgin Gorda specifically has everything. The Baths, which I’ve genuinely always wanted to see, are these massive granite boulders scattered along the shore that create these natural pools and grottos that look like something out of a movie. Jost Van Dyke is a short ferry ride away and has the Soggy Dollar Bar, a beach bar so legendary that people swim ashore to get a drink there, which is obviously something we’re doing. The island itself is small, quiet, and not overrun. It’s the kind of place where exclusivity isn’t a marketing word, it’s just the reality of where you are.
We booked a hotel, and for the first time in this entire process, the research stopped feeling like work and started feeling like anticipation.
We leave June 7th. Less than five weeks away.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve stopped reading reviews entirely. Old habits. But at some point in this process, somewhere between the canceled bookings and the spreadsheets and Gerald’s towel complaints, I stopped planning a trip and started actually looking forward to one. And that felt like the right place to land.
The wedding is the main event. Everyone knows that.
But knowing where we’re going after it? That helps.
Tracking: 1104071
