Maybe instead of El Nido in the Phillipines we'll go to Phuket (ha ha!) in Thailand. There's a lot of great looking inexpensive resorts and getting there isn't quite as complicated as Palawan.
Here are some pictures. What do you think?
Thankfully Matt checked up on our idea to go to El Nido in the Philippines because it seems that some of the hotels that we may have considered have already sold out for the time frame that we would be going. After looking at the pictures below perhaps you can understand why. El Nido is absolutely gorgeous and very reasonable for cost. How we first ran across El Nido was doing a search for cheaper tropical vacations. Neither Matt nor I were keen on going to Hawaii or one of the more common honeymoon destinations - especially since we have already cruised all over the Caribbean. We wanted somewhere new and somewhat exotic, not too expensive, and that had nice beaches, waterfalls, cliffs to climb, reefs to snorkel. El Nido is the place as far as we can tell. And, thankfully, we will just be flying over the parts of the Philippines that are currently having upheaval.
This picture may be a bit dated, but I just had to post it...
Christmas is marching around the corner, so wedding planning has basically gone onto the backburner. The good news is that we still have a lot of time to get wedding stuff done. The bad news is that the ceremony site is still up in the air. It seems that Portage County and the National Lakeshore cannot decide who is going to manage the new Riverwalk Pavilion that they just jointly finished building. We are crossing our fingers and hoping that Portage will take it over since we already are doing our reception through them and they have seemed rather accommodating so far. The National Lakeshore on the other hand will not allow chairs, music, trellises, etc. on their beaches, which was not what they originally told us when we talked to them. Matt, the sweety that he is, took a day off from work and spent most of it driving up and down that area looking for alternatives for the ceremony site. If worse comes to worst, we can always rent a house on the lakeshore and have it on that beach. It just may not as close to the reception hall as the Riverwalk Pavilion is. Basically, we will have to sit tight and wait to see how it goes in the spring. Above is a small picture of the pavilion taken as they were finishing the construction in October.
Wow, any of those places would be perfect!