But wait, there’s more! You didn’t think I would leave out all the intimate details of our honeymoon, did you?

It was inexplicably wonderful to vacation in Maui with a big group of family and friends — we pretty much took over the resort! We couldn’t walk from one end to the other without running into at least a handful of people we know — but we were glad that we opted to honeymoon on another island altogether. The sheer exhaustion of all that socializing (and almost two years of, for me, planning, and for Rob, worrying) hit us like a ton of bricks, which seemed apropos given that we were vacationing on an island completely covered in rock.

With several active volcanoes spotting the terrain, the Big Island feels more like the moon than a tropical paradise. You can drive for an hour and scarcely see another soul, let alone a shrub. A thin haze (or vog, as they insist on calling it) hangs in the air, giving the days a dreamlike quality and making the nights almost frighteningly dark. And there is lava everywhere.

The landscape is absolutely breathtaking and unlike anything I have ever seen. I’m not one to cry at a pretty sunset, but something about setting foot on earth that was only just created 20 years ago gives me goosebumps. It feels like the end of the world, and the beginning, all at the same time.

On a drive through Kilauea national park, home of the most active volcano, the road comes to an abrupt stop because, just several dozen years ago, lava flowed over it. How ridiculous is that?

The whole “active volcano” thing made Rob a bit nervous. Here he is on our way up the mountain, preparing to put the top back on our sweet white Chrysler Sebring convertible, when the weather abruptly changed.

And here he is as we passed a sign that warned us to roll up our windows, as the emissions from the volcano contained sulphur and were unsafe to breathe. I, of course, insisted on rolling them back down to take a picture.

Rob was having none of it.

The entire vacation, he worried that the volcano was about to erupt and we’d all be swept into the ocean to our certain deaths. I made fun of him, naturally. They can predict when the volcano is going to erupt, they wouldn’t let tourists in dangerous places, this is America, blah blah blah.

But no sooner do we get home than the the Big Island’s name was splashed across headlines:

Huge Fountain of Lava Gushes From Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii
Kilauea volcano magma meets ocean with 100-foot lava burst
Scientists scratch heads at unpredicted eruption, should have listened to paranoid tourist

Yes, that’s right. Our honeymoon spot was ablaze.

The flight home was obscene. Do not, under any circumstances, fly United Airlines to Hawaii. Here is Rob, in the teeny-tiny, seven-gate, outdoor, cockroach-infested, Greyhound-station-esque airport, on hour three of our 30-hour delay, making the most of the mandatory down-time by billing some hours.

And here I am, on hour 29.

Caption: I hate it

Finally, for what amounted to (or at least felt like) three days without sleep, we were back in Chicago. And just in the nick of time for wedding numbers two and three!