When we checked into our overwater villa yesterday they mentioned to us that we had a sunrise view and not to miss it in the morning. Jenn and I joked that we’d probably never be up early enough to see a sunrise but this morning we were up a little after 5AM and watched the sky turn from pitch black to a beautiful sunny morning. It was a beautiful way to start our 12th wedding anniversary something that wasn’t lost on either of us as we sat gazing over the Indian Ocean on our loungers.

The flight to the Maldives was nearly 20-hours worth of flying, not to mention we had an 8-hour layover in Abu Dhabi. So although this is a post about September 18th it does contain a few hours of September 17th when we arrived in Abu Dhabi.

It’s been 795 days since Jenn and I last left the country on a vacation together. When we arrived back from Singapore in the summer of 2019 there was no way that we could have ever imagined such a long gap; thanks COVID. But after a lot of trial and tribulation two weeks ago we booked a 10-day trip from New York to the Maldives.

Since moving to New York in 2018 I’ve tried to go visit my family in California three to four times a year. I was planning to come visit in August but at some point I was talking to Jake and we decided to change my trip to California to a brothers trip. We looked at a few ideas but the one that we quickly landed on was Iceland a place Jake has talked about wanting to go to for a long, long time. So even with the pandemic we booked it and on August 11th we began our journey to Reykjavik, Iceland.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post about a trip. You’d have to all the way back to either February of 2020 when we did a weekend trip to Philadelphia or even further back to July of 2019 when we went to Egypt, UAE, Mumbai, and Singapore. It’s been a long road to travel again and even now after a three-night trip to Washington DC we are still battling a new “delta” outbreak of COVID-19 so the travel of 2019 still feels somewhat far away.

I genuinely cannot remember the last time that Jenn and I went away for a weekend. It’s just never been our style. We have always preferred to do the big 2-3 week trips. But now that we’ve lived in New York for a little under two-years it felt almost criminal not to explore outside the confines of the island. So this past weekend we left our 700 sq ft apartment and went out in search of our first mini getaway to Philadelphia.