Kevin Kriegel & Nathan Lepp

Dear Kevin and Nathan,

We wanted to thank you for helping make our honeymoon the adventure of a lifetime. Because we wanted to share photos of your gifts, we decided against sending more traditional thank-you cards; instead, below is a picture gallery of what your contributions made possible!

<nerdy statement> A decade's worth of psychological research suggests that experiences make us happier than material possessions. </nerdy statement> Because we're fortunate enough to share a home with the appliances and furniture we need (IKEA furniture, but hey), we opted for a less traditional spin on wedding registries. It was our hope that a Honeyfund would offer a month's worth of incredible experiences—from dinners to sightseeing, from train tickets to hotel rooms—that we could directly attribute to the loved ones who made those experiences possible. We even carried a spreadsheet with us everywhere we went that indicated who had sponsored each activity, which helped guide us through each day.

Please enjoy the photos and captions below! If you'd like to see more pictures of our honeymoon travels, you can view the full gallery here.

Thank you again for your generosity and friendship, and for making this first chapter of our marriage possible.

Love from,

What you sponsored: A private wine tour in Venice

Thanks to you, we had a perfect evening exploring Venice's historic pubs and wine bars, learning about Tuscan grape varietals and methods of wine-making, and tasting Venetian "cichetti," or tapas. Below are photos of where we went, what we tasted, and what we learned throughout the tour!

We started our wine tour by Frari Church and wound our way to the Rialto area (one of Venice's key tourism spots, centered around Ponte Rialto). Along the way, Davide brought us up to speed on ways of life in Venice, such as securing drinkable water (which used to be the churches' mission hundreds of years ago) and maintaining historic homes on a series of 118 islands that are constantly shifting. As you can see here, buildings slowly warp over time, so that doorways shift into a diagonal and wooden doors have to be cut at odd shapes to fit. As Rick Steves says repeatedly in his tours of Venice, it's questionable how much longer the city will be inhabitable.

Our first stop on the wine tour was Osteria Bancogiro, which sat on Campo San Giacomo di Rialto--a square (campo, because only San Marco can be a piazza in Venice) that features one of the first Roman numeral clocks in Venice ca. the 1400s. This clock is so old that the Roman numeral four (now IV) is displayed as the former IIII.

Osteria Bancogiro is famous because it used to be a bank from the year 1600 before it was turned into a pub-like restaurant.

We first tried a prosecco DOCG Superiore Adami Bosco di Gica (using the Italian charmat method), which was so dry that even Ryan--not a lover of bubbles--enjoyed it. This prosecco was served with a Venetian delicacy: thinly sliced bread topped with cod, which had been whipped with olive oil. That's it--just cod and olive oil, and the simple combination was delicious (even for Jess, who hates fish).

Our next stop was Cantina do Spade (two spades), the oldest pub in Venice (est. 1448).

We have no idea what we ate with our Teroldego Rotaliano Barone di Cles (in other words, a type of Teroldego), but we know it was deep fried and involved cheese and ham and we were in heaven. Do Spade didn't actually carry a wine that Davide wanted to show us, so he came earlier in the day with this red, asked them to uncork it for him to let it breathe, and served it to us that evening.

The Campo della Pescado, Venice's indoor/outdoor fish market. The stones look wet because they'd just hosed them down after closing the market for the evening.

We took a "black gondola" (a black-and-gold gondola that crosses back and forth across the Grand Canal for just a euro or two) to Cannaregio, Venice's second largest island.

Cannaregio. Unlike the rest of Venice, it's much more local-centric, streets are wider and cleaner, and it also houses the city's Jewish Quarter.

Vino Vero, one of Venice's best wine bars according to TripAdvisor. (When I told Davide about this, he got very indignant and said it wouldn't even be in the top 10, except that he was friends with the owners and it had a great location on the water.) We had a Barbera d'Asti La Gonella here.

Fun fact: Jess is deathly allergic to cashews and pistachios. Although pistachios are a central part of Italian cuisine (thanks, gelato), cashews are very rare--rare enough that there is no actual word for them in Italian. (Google Translate swears it's "anacardia," which stems from "against the heart" in Latin and Greek...funny, because it will literally stop Jess's heart. Even so, multiple locals from Rome, Florence, and Venice promised that they'd never heard of an edible substance called "anacardia" in their lives.) When I showed Davide a picture of a cashew--just in preparation for this wine tour, with the explanation that I wasn't in the mood for an ER trip on an ambulance boat--he just blinked and said, "But that's a peanut, isn't it?"

And here's where it gets really funny--Davide asked Vino Vero to serve two savory bruschetta with our wine while we sat outside, enjoying the sunset. He then came hurrying out, looking very proud of himself, and said "They have anacardia! They have it here!"

As you could guess, Ryan had the cashew and cheese bruschetta (the one to the right), and I had the cured pork with fruit preserves.

Cantina Aziende Agricole, where we had a Valpolicella Ripasso Le Torbe Dominii Veneti (in other words, a Corvina). We loved this one so much that we got a bottle for ourselves. We'd never had a ripasso (in which winemakers pass the wine through already-used grape skins for a second round), and we loved the smooth complexity of this particular wine.

Al Timon, our last stop on the tour. We had a Franciacorta Clarabella Essenza (a Chardonnay) and a Torcolato Col Dovigo '11 (a Vespaiola). I think both were served with chocolates, but to perfectly honest, we were five glasses of wine in and it was kind of a blur.