I looked at my wedding day countdown yesterday and was surprised to find out that I have 88 days left before my wedding – well… as of today there’s 88.

It’s high-time I gave a little advice on honeymoon planning. Now, it’s always a safe bet to start planning the honeymoon at least six months in advance. Lodging options start booking (depending upon where you choose to go) and it gets harder to book tours and other activities if you wait until the last minute.

Thankfully, we were still able to book our trip – even though we waited until 3 months out! Brett and I are very outdoorsey people, and we’re not really into the whole beach resort thing that comes to mind when trying to find a romantic getaway for a honeymoon. So… we brainstormed for about 3 months… and we kept asking ourselves… “what sounds like fun?”

What we really wanted to do was run off to Ireland for a couple of weeks, but ultimately decided that’s not an option. It’s expensive… and we both may have to take some unpaid vacation in order to take enough time off to get married and take a trip.

It occurred to us that we both really like National Parks and that there were many in the U.S. that neither of us had been to. So we finally decided it would be a good idea to plan a trip to a park we’d not been to.

Our decision? Glacier National Park. And, after looking at a map, we realized that Yellowstone, Teton, Devil’s Tower National Monument, and Mount Rushmoore were all along the route – if we chose to drive that far. The other option we came up with, was to fly into Montana and stay at Glacier NP for a week.

There are problems with both ideas, of course. To do a driving tour would take way-longer than we are willing to take off work. And to fly up to Montana for a week means a serious chunk of change for flights. However, when looking into the flying option, we also discovered that the park’s main road also closes a week or two before we are due to arrive.

In the end, and after speaking with several people who’ve been up that way, we’ve decided to go to Grand Teton and Yellowstone because we’ve heard that both parks are amazing. Also, there is less of a chance for freak-snowstorms in the last week of September in northern Wyoming, than there is in northern Montana. We’ve used mapquest to plan out the trip and we found out it’s going to be fairly inexpensive to drive the route. And, much to our surprise, there is also available lodging at Yellowstone, because it’s just after the peak season. Normally, you have to call at least 9 months in advance to get lodging there!

So, we’re well on our way to planning out our trip. We’re still debating about whether to take a trip over to eastern Wyoming to see Devil’s Tower, so I’ll have to keep you posted. For now, I’m just excited to have a NP trip in the works!