Ever since Blake and I met and then got married, I've had a desire to go to the Philippines where Blake served a mission for our church and meet all the kind people he spoke of. If you asked me 9 weeks ago when I thought we'd make it to the Philippines, I would've said, "Five years..." It all happened so fast. One night Blake and I were hypothetically planning all the things we wanted to do in the Philippines whenever we made it there and he asked me that question. I gave him the five year answer and I think it sort of shocked him. He felt like that was a long time away and after some discussion we decided that now was really the best time to do it. At first I put up a big fight. I didn't want to miss so much school and we hadn't really planned on taking a big trip this year, but there's not always going to be a perfect time for everything, so we bought some plane tickets and started planning.
Just wanted to post this picture from when we were dating. Notice Blake's button-up shirt with the Philippine islands embroidered on it. I knew early on that if we got married, we'd go back. This isn't the only shirt he had with the Philippine islands embroidered on it and ever since we got married, we've flown the Filipino flag in our home.
I hadn't been outside the country since we got married, so the first order of business was getting myself a new passport with my new name. (Last time I traveled outside the country was to visit the TayTeam in Mexico City.)
I guess I never ended up ordering our marriage license after we got married, so I had to order that from Los Angeles County, expedite the processing, pay for overnight shipping, then turn around and get my passport photos taken and printed and expedite the processing for that and pay for overnight shipping all so I could get it back in time for our trip. I got it back about one week before we left and at that point I felt like I could finally relax. If nothing else went right, at least I had all the paperwork I needed to get myself inside the country.
We knew we would spend some time in Manila and figured it could be our hub while we traveled to Blake's mission area and departed to the island of Palawan after that. One thing that's nice about the Philippines is once you get there, lodging and food is relatively inexpensive. We decided to use Airbnb and found a nice high-rise condo in the Makati area. It was around $40 a night which was actually a bit more than some of the others, but after I saw the picture of the pool overlooking the city, I decided I NEEDED to stay there. Can you blame me?
Next on our list was finding a romantic resort. As much as I wanted to visit all the people Blake taught and got to know on his mission, I wasn't about to travel to a tropical island on the other side of the world and not get enjoy a beach resort. Whenever I would talk to Filipino people about visiting, they would always tell me that Blake should take me to Boracay, but Blake did his own research and spoke with a lot more Filipino people and they recommended the island of Palawan since it was less touristy. It also helped that it was voted the number one island in the world by Conde Nast Traveler.
We found a great package deal at the Sheridan Beach Resort & Spa that had some fun activities included and we were sold.
Those were all the big things and once we had that all taken care of, we made an excel sheet and planned out every day, hour by hour. I'm not usually too much of a planner, but Blake is and you'd better believe for our big trip that everything was going to be planned down to the minute, just so we wouldn't leave anything up to chance.
We were scheduled to depart Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 11:00 PM and arrive in Manila Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:30 AM. With the time change, we spent our entire Sunday in the air, but it was super nice because we had a direct flight from San Francisco to Manila. With everything all set, I went to school on Saturday and then came home to get our bags and left for our big adventure!
It worked out that we ate dinner with my brothers that night and my brothers were willing to take us and pick us up from the airport so we didn't have to park our car there. I love having family close. It's nice that they're willing to help us out, but also so much fun to just hang out with them on a regular basis. We all look similar and dorky with our glasses. Ha.
This is our last picture before we boarded our plane to the Philippines.
Next up: a recap on our time in Manila.
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