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Waves of Love: Choosing a gay honeymoon

Choosing a gay honeymoon: Waves of Love

Editor Randall Shirley and his husband Denni, enjoying the first dance at their recent wedding in Canada. Photo (c) may not be reproduced without permission

I got married in early August. I’m lucky enough to live in a place where same-sex marriage is legal and recognized at all levels of government: Canada. And while this blog is about cruising, I hope you’ll indulge me for just a moment while I say that Denni and my wedding ceremony was the most beautiful, moving, and powerful experience of my life. About 80 friends and family members attended, and as one friend put it, “it felt like we were repeatedly washed over with waves of love.”

We got a lot of advice prior to the wedding (and some at the wedding!), and among that advice was, “don’t skip doing a honeymoon—take it soon after the wedding because it will be a powerful time for you two.”

And today I’m writing you from Day #1 of our honeymoon, which is a 3-part trip involving 3 planes, 3 trains, 2 automobiles, and 1 cruise ship. Right now we’re on AMTRAK (organic apples and surprisingly good quality food in the deli car, who knew?), southbound from Vancouver to Portland, Oregon where we’ll spend a few nights and attend other friends’ wedding, and then fly to Anchorage, for a few nights there. Then we’ll board our Celebrity Millennium cruise home to Vancouver, visiting many ports along the Alaska Panhandle.

How we chose this trip. Our honeymoon could have been anywhere in the world. With the amount of travel I do, I have enough frequent flyer points to take us both around the globe. I also have gobs of hotel points, and car rental points. But we’ve both been to the other side of the world (many other sides, actually), and decided we wanted a honeymoon that felt closely associated with the region where we live.

We have both always wanted to do an Alaska cruise—and while this may sound snobbish: for me it had to be one that started on Mainland Alaska. I felt like racing up and down the panhandle would sort of feel like only doing a partial transit of the Panama Canal, not quite a full Alaska experience. That’s just my opinion, so we decided to spend some of my points getting to Alaska (an often expensive plane ticket if you buy it cash), and cruise home.

That really limited our cruise line and ship choices, but luckily Celebrity (a fave of mine) makes the run on a date that works for us. We also considered Seabourn, but I have a dream of first trying them in the South Pacific (I have a lot of cruise dreams).

So, welcome to our honeymoon. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing, sharing photos, and videos about Celebrity, the Millennium, Anchorage, flightseeing over Denali, glacier and wildlife viewing, riding the world’s longest zip line, enjoying a seafood feast in Ketchikan, and more. Come along for waves of love.