Back to Where It All Began: Four Days in Antigua, Guatemala
From test trip to wedding destination: why Antigua means so much to us
After 2.5 months of zigzagging across Borneo and Oceania, we got some much-needed friend time during two weddings. The first was Tanaya and Nishal’s wedding in San Diego in mid-May, followed by Dan and Emma’s in the San Francisco Bay Area on Memorial Day weekend. This presented us with a two-week window that we decided to allocate toward two countries we’ve visited together before. Today, we’re covering Guatemala.
This time, we weren’t just eating and hiking volcanoes. We were venue-searching, hotel-shopping, and shooting our Save the Dates. Yes, we’re getting married here (next year)!
Why Antigua?
Long before we were fiancés, one of the first things we bonded over was our shared love of travel and how rare it is to find someone truly compatible in that department. We swapped horror stories from past trips and agreed: no amount of chemistry can make up for travel incompatibility. If you can’t handle a delayed flight, food poisoning, or a night of howling dogs together, it’s hard to imagine handling life together.
If the last three months have taught us anything, it’s that travel, and especially long-term travel, demands constant problem-solving, patience, and a willingness to be uncomfortable. Doing it with a partner also requires trust, flexibility, and honest communication, especially when one is exhausted, dehydrated, or hangry. It’s one thing to say travel is important; it’s another to actually travel well together.
A few weeks into dating, we decided to find out. Talking about our styles was promising, but not enough. We agreed: if we weren’t travel-compatible, better to call it quits early.
We wanted somewhere warm, accessible, and remote-work friendly, and landed on Antigua, Guatemala. We booked the trip about three weeks after meeting (mid-November 2022), for four months later (mid-March 2023). Many of our friends asked us the obvious question: “You’ve been dating for three weeks, what if you’re not together anymore by March?”
The answer: we’d wave from opposite sides of the plane and go our separate ways on arrival.
On the contrary, that trip cemented our relationship. We hiked to see Volcán Fuego erupt (my first overnight hike and Claire’s first brush with altitude sickness), ate our body weight in cheese, and handled the kind of hiccups that make or break a couple. On our first day, Claire was sick, and I went out to find her a giant water and a chicken pesto penne, a preview of our future travel dynamics. By the time we flew home, we had confirmed what we already mostly knew: we had something worth building on.
When we got engaged a year and a half later, having our wedding in Antigua just made sense.
Wedding Planning on a Timeline
This trip to Guatemala was just four days, but we made it count. We had already chosen a wedding planner back in March (self-planning a destination wedding while traveling would be impossible), and he lined up a packed schedule of 6 venue visits. We’re keeping the final choice a surprise for now, but it checks all our boxes: lush, green, distinctly Antiguan, and very “us.”
Other wedding-related accomplishments during this trip included:
We finalized the date (leaving plenty of time between the end of the Year of Travel and the wedding itself for nailing the details)
We booked our welcome party venue
We booked our photographers (after working with them for our Save the Date shoot)
We toured a bunch of hotel options
Needless to say, we wrapped up the week feeling incredibly productive and excited.
Some Non-Wedding Highlights
While most of our time was wedding-focused, we squeezed in a few of our favorite things from our first trip, plus some new discoveries:
Artista de Café: Our favorite coffee shop from the first trip. We went two mornings in a row and ordered the same breakfast each time. Their ‘Sunshine Toast’ is unreal.
Restaurante Frida’s: They have this insane queso fundido that I distinctly remembered from our last trip, and it was a well-earned reward after a few weeks of eating healthy in the lead-up to the Save the Date shoot.
Pilates + Gym: Claire found a local studio she loved (I don’t do pilates after quivering for an hour during my last attempt), and we both dropped into a local gym to build a tiny bit of consistency into our otherwise chaotic travel lifestyle.
Postcards & Boutiques: We added a few new postcards to our collection (have you signed up for our surprise handwritten postcard list yet?) and poked around the local shops for wedding ideas and random souvenirs.
A Full-Circle Feeling
This trip didn’t have the same “first-time-in-new-country-with-a-new-travel-buddy” feeling that our original visit had, but it had something better:
Pride in the relationship we’ve built together since our last visit
Satisfaction from actually quitting our jobs and being on the year of travel that we’ve dreamt of since before we met
Excitement for our wedding and a lifetime of adventures ahead
We’re so excited for the day we get to share this special place with so many of our loved ones in person. In the meantime, we’ve got 9 months of travel and some big life decisions to make.
It's a volcano place?
Looking forward to your big day!