Life: Pre-honeymoon planning

I previously mentioned here that the hubby and I were planning on going to Europe for our honeymoon.  Now that we're back  I would like to share with all of you the highlights of our trip.  Let me begin by saying that neither one of us had ever been to Europe and we had no idea what to expect.  I began the planning process six months before our trip.  I read countless of forums, books, and reviews pertaining to anything that might make me a savvy traveler.

Here's a little about what I learned:

Flight
I first began planning our trip by booking our flight and I used Kayak and ITA software to look for them.  Once I saw a flight I liked I went to the individual sites and compared their fees to the others.  After doing a few comparisons we decided to fly with Virgin Atlantic.  I read several articles like this one that said that Tuesdays were the best day to purchase tickets.  I bought them a few months before we left because I wanted to make sure we got decent seats since we were flying economy. I used SeatGuru to compare the different seats on the airplane which came in handy on the way over there. Overall I was pleased with our flight with Virgin with the exception of their carryon requirements which you can find here. We decided to fly from Los Angeles International Airport to Heathrow Airport in London on a 10 hour nonstop flight.

Hotels
When I was looking up which hotels to stay at I used sites like Trip Advisor, Fodor's, Frommer's, Condé Nast Traveler, and the New York Times Travel to aid me in the process.  I read an insane amount of reviews and tried really hard to see past the "fake" ones.  I focused on the value a hotel gave us versus how much it was going to cost us.  I mean you have to know by now that I'm a tad frugal nonetheless I did not rule out staying at either 4 or 5 star hotels.

Once I had the two major things out of the way I focused on our itinerary and I began to plan out the fun things. I will recap our honeymoon in the next few weeks and along the way I will include details on how how we got from London to Paris, how much luggage we took and how we dealt with the different currency.

Update:

Before any planning began I made sure that we had passports  and that we didn't  didn't need any visas to the places we were traveling to.  Since I changed my name when we got married I need to make sure it was up to date.  I ordered my new passport with plenty of time especially since we hadn't set the dates for our vacation.  I decided to take my passport photos at AAA* and I summited it at the United States Postal Service.  Make sure that you send in all the information correctly because it will save you time and money. Visit here for more information and passport applications.

*You might want to order an extra set of passport photos just in case you lose your passport or if it gets stolen when your on your trip. 

Good luck and happy travels!

Here are the recaps of our trip:

Day 1, Day 2,  Day 3 (Pt. 1), Day 3 (Pt. 2), Day 4 (Pt. 1), Day 4 (Pt. 2), Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9,