Trenton & Jordan Downey

Dear Trenton and Jordan,

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: International SIM cards

In the weeks leading up to the honeymoon, we realized that no amount of preparation would prevent us from ending up lost, unable to communicate (particularly in Hungarian), or hopelessly unable to make reservations or pull up booked tickets on at least a daily basis. We decided to get an international SIM card for Ryan's phone, which carried his data plan from the U.S. to any European country.

Your contribution saved us time and time again, almost to a laughable degree. Below are some (out of many) examples of ways we relied on international data to function wherever we went.

Ryan hadn't been to Rome (or, more specifically, Rome's hipster district of Trastevere) in almost a decade, so we relied on Google Maps to get us through the winding streets.

We kept an eye on crowds in Rome's piazzas (plazas) via Google throughout the day to figure out the best time to stop by for photos.

The basic theme of our trip went like this:

(1) we'd discover something really cool about a place, like a plaque in a language we couldn't read or a decorative piece that didn't seem to make a lot of sense, so

(2) one of us would pull out the trusty Wikipedia or Google Translate, and

(3) we'd just hover over our phones, trying to learn as much about that particular place as possible.

For the Pantheon, we spent 5 minutes reading about all the crazy architectural wonders that went into constructing this perfect dome.

We accidentally stumbled upon this view while using Google Maps to take a shortcut up to some of the hills near Vatican City.

4 out of 5 times, we'd choose a restaurant for lunch or dinner based on TripAdvisor (Europe's Yelp) reviews...and it very rarely led us astray.

Yet another time that we stumbled across some ancient Roman ruins (here, in the middle of the Jewish Quarter) and pulled out our phones to look up when they were built, what they were, and why they were still there.

The line to climb the Duomo was so long that we hopped online to reserve tickets, instead--and it saved us hours (and hours) of time.

Rick Steves recommended visiting San Miniato al Monte, a church built in the 1100s that is still in use today, for its perfect views of Florence. Without Google, we could never have figured out how to wind our way through Oltrarno (across the Arno river) and up the hill to the church.

It turns out San Miniato's monks make their own gelato, biscotti, and liqueur (including limoncello, which we brought back with us). We sat on this gardenia-covered bench and ate the monks' gelato while reading up on their monastery online.

Trying to find a good gondolier was much harder than we expected. We stood in a piazza in Venice for 15 minutes, reading techniques and phrases in Italian to use when trying to find a good gondola ride. It worked--we had an excellent time, and got to explore some of Venice's back canals, including dipping under these (scarily low) arches.

Google Maps, bless them, is now equipped with all of Venice's public transportation routes--which exclusively means "water taxis." We took a water taxi through Veneto around the Venetian Lagoon to the colorful island of Burano.

Finding Burano which would have been near impossible without Google telling us where to catch which taxi and when.

If you didn't know this, Jess is deathly allergic to cashews and pistachios. "Pistachio" is a super common word in Italian (thanks, gelato), but cashews are so rare that they don't even have a word for them. She relied on Google to pull up translations, definitions, and pictures of cashews in places where we couldn't be sure what we were about to eat. In one place, it saved her at the last minute from an ER visit (the bruschetta on the right is covered in cashews).

All Jess wanted to do in Grindelwald, Switzerland was take a tin toboggan ride. It turns out finding these rides is really confusing--the signs throughout town point toward a children's park without mentioning whether it has a toboggan run. We had Google open the whole way through town while trying to find this place. (It was worth it.)

We had a day of free train travel to use, so we made a day trip around Thunnersee (the Sea of Thun) and Brienzersee (the Sea of Brienz) around Interlaken, Bern, and Lucern. That same day, we visited two castles--which was very difficult, because it also happened to be Whit Monday, so almost everything was closed. We relied on the Internet to look up holiday hours and phone numbers throughout the day to make sure things were open.

So Jess is a big fan of old 007 movies, and freaked out when she found out "On her Majesty's Secret Service" was filmed at the rotating restaurant on the top of the nearby Schilthorn. We used their website to keep an eye on the 360º camera every day we were in Interlaken to figure out when it would be clearest at the top of the peak.

Luckily, this meant we were able to get an online reservation for brunch on the clearest morning we were there!

Snapped this photo while hopelessly lost on a hillside in Salzburg, trying to find Augustiner Biergarten. When we finally used Google Maps, we found out it was at the bottom of the hill all along. Naturally.

We happened to be in Vienna during Pride, which was fun to see! So we kept an eye on Pride events throughout those few days, which helped guide some of our sightseeing toward the end of our time there.

Ryan downloaded the Ancestry.com app while we sat in Vienna's Belvedere Gardens, and looked up the marriage certificate of his great-great-grandmother, Hanny Schwarz (née Deutsch). Thanks to that certificate, we were able to find her 1904 home in Vienna's Jewish District, which is where she lived before moving to New York.

While Jess got a massage, Ryan used cell data to watch House of Cards in Budapest's Gellért Thermal Baths. He was in heaven.

This sounds like a funny story, but at the time it wasn't. We were in the middle of this nature-covered island in the Danube, between Buda and Pest. We were a very far walk from the bridge to get off the island, and Jess drank so much coffee that morning that she needed a bathroom like you wouldn't believe. Ryan had to download a public bathroom-finding app, which guided us to a random little building in a grove of trees that we never would have found otherwise.

Thanks to TripAdvisor, we spent our last evening in Budapest at Whiskers Cat Pub, a...cat pub. With alcoholic beverages...and cats. We were (Jess was) ecstatic.

On our last evening of the honeymoon, which we spent in Fiumicino, Ryan was stretched out by the spas and watching more House of Cards. Just look at the joy in those eyes.