Honeymoon: Beginning Travel

Yes – we did it! We’re married! It was an unbelievable weekend celebration with all of our closest family and friends. Thanks to all those who travelled near and far to join us in the celebration. We can’t wait to blog about the wedding weekend with all the pictures and videos. We’ve gotten a lot of pictures from people (thanks Bob, Leanne, Heather, Fred, Rich, Matt, Mike and others). If anyone else has pictures, please send them to us. We’d love to see them! We’ll be blogging about the wedding soon enough.

After an unbelievable wedding weekend in Newport, Rhode Island, we drove back to our apartment in New York to prepare for the honeymoon. After running some last minute errands on Sunday and Monday, we set out for JFK airport on Monday evening. We had an 11:30pm flight first to Doha, Qatar then after a layover for a few hours, we had another flight to the Maldives – islands in the Indian Ocean.

Anthony’s father did this exact thing before his honeymoon flight – pictures of the tickets.




Mr. and Mrs. Civale in the Qatar Airlines lounge before departing New York.



Mrs. Amy Civale in front of our plane.



Moments before takeover on the first leg of the trip – a 12 hour flight to Doha.




Luckily the seats extended all the way out to a bed so we could get some sleep – we were both exhausted from a big wedding weekend. We slept comfortably for more than 9 hours of the 12 hour flight.



Once we arrived in Doha at 7pm local time on Tuesday, we settled into the lounge for a long layover until our 1am flight to Male, Maldives. We had dinner. We played travel scrabble (Amy won). We read. We assembled our new underwater video camera (which Amy got Anthony as one of her wedding gifts to him). We began watching the series Rescue Me (thanks Doug, for the recommendation).



Then it was time to take a bus to our plane. The bus was very nice (Qatar airlines dubs itself as the world’s #1 first class airline – it didn’t disappoint).




Plane #2



Amy’s now traditional plane reading (as made famous by Pastor Henry’s homily).



This was a four hour trip so we slept again and then awoke to the sun shining. Amy’s rings (now two) had a lot of sparkle



Our first glimpse of the Maldives – a series of over 300 islands in the Indian Ocean.



Mr. and Mrs. Civale in the baggage reclaim area. We were NOT travelling efficiently. Look at all this luggage.







After a 12 hour flight, a 5 hour layover in Doha and a 4 hour flight, we had to board a boat for an hour journey to Reethi Rah resort in the Maldives where we were staying for 8 days. We were tired, but it was a nice boat ride.



This is our “before color” – please note this as our color will change throughout the trip (especially Anthony’s).



Finally, the travelling is over. We arrived at Reethi Rah resort in the Maldives at around noon on Wednesday.