Advice to young couples, Part 2

If you're already married, you can skip this one. If you're planning your honeymoon, read on.

Be careful with your honeymoon plans.

I strongly suggest you give careful consideration to where you go on your honeymoon. Please don't go somewhere you may never visit again. If the choices are Europe or Eureka Springs, please go to Eureka Springs. Put the money you save in a CD and visit Europe for your fifth or tenth anniversary.

Here's the reason. If you go to someplace you may never be able to visit again, you'll spend most of your honeymoon rushing around trying to see everything. After all, you'll probably never be back, so you have to see it now, right? Even worse is if you have a tour package that requires you to be in Paris on Tuesday and Berlin on Wednesday.

Go someplace nice for your honeymoon, but make it someplace that you can relax and enjoy. As odd as it sounds to you right now, you probably won't spend every minute of your honeymoon in bed. Go someplace where you can stroll down a street hand-in-hand, now and then popping into a quaint little shop. Or maybe a country inn with woodsy walking trails. Even go somplace with a few tourist attractions, but make sure that you aren't going to worry about whether you will ever see them again or not. Then, if you decide to take in an attraction on a lazy afternoon, you can do so. But if you decide to sit beside the hotel pool and talk, you can do that, too.

So what are my personal choices in this part of the country? Eureka Springs would be just about perfect. Consider the Denver or Colorado Springs area. Perhaps the Black Hills. If you like the shows, how about Branson? Las Vegas is a really inexpensive (and fun) destination if you don't gamble. Need to spend even less? Consider Omaha or Kansas City.

I hear you asking how well I followed this advice. Norma and I were married on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. My sister was home on leave from the Navy for our wedding. So, we spent one night in Hutchinson, a couple of nights at her apartment in Great Bend, a couple more at my apartment in Salina, then we went to my parents' house for the holiday. Some honeymoon, eh? And yes, we had two apartments. These days, couples move in together and then (sometimes) marry later. We had to be different. We married in November, then didn't move in together until Christmastime. Job reqirements kept us apart, but the weekends sure were a blast!