Box Trips
A lot of people ask us how we pick our destinations. It all started with our wedding officiant, Annemarie Juhlian. We met with Annemarie months before our wedding at a little restaurant in the Eastlake area of Seattle. We liked her immediately and she was the only option we considered to marry us. One of the things we liked about Annmarie was that she believed in each couple she marries taking something tangible away, a memento of their wedding. For example, for one couple, they bought a sapling. At their wedding, they had all of their attendees put their names on rocks and put the rocks with the sapling. They planted the tree and put all the rocks around the tree for an everlasting memento.
Annemarie had us fill out a survey asking for lots of details about who we are as people, what we enjoyed doing separately and together, what we wanted to do as a married couple, and so forth. Once we sent her the survey, she put together our wedding vows. She sent the wedding vows a couple of months before our wedding for us to review and provide feedback.
I remember to this day Seth and I reading the vows at the same time. Seth reads faster than I do and at one point he said “Huh…. Annemarie has planned our vacations for the next few years.” After I asked “what?”, Seth just told me to keep reading. A few minutes later, I understood. Here’s the excerpt from our vows:
CELEBRANT: To further celebrate their vows and this moment, Seth and Amy have created a unique “memento” to take home from this ceremony ~ one that celebrates what they love doing as a couple ~ traveling and seeing new places ~ and their intention to travel the world together.
(Annemarie presents Travel Keepsake Box) In this Keepsake Box, there are 25 envelopes.
In the weeks before this ceremony, Seth and Amy made a list of 25 places they would like to travel to and/or experience and each place is now in a sealed envelope. On each wedding anniversary, our couple is going to select a “surprise travel envelope” and will have a new place to experience that year!
I would like to invite Seth and Amy to now select their first envelope – and to share the destination they will go to in this coming year, the first year of their marriage!
(Seth and Amy open envelope and share destination!)
After reading this, Seth and I loved the idea and we enthusiastically started thinking of destinations to put in our travel keepsake box. It was really hard to narrow it down to just 25 destinations! I think we ended up with 32. We spent hours looking over maps and talking about things we’d want to see together.
At our wedding, we pulled the first destination which was Argentina. To date, we’ve pulled:
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Argentina (2011)
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Australia (2012)
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Belgium (2014)
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Caribbean (2013)
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Czech Republic (2020 - canceled due to Covid)
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Egypt (2022)
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France (2017)
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Indonesia (2016)
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Morocco (2015)
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New Zealand (2023)
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Panama (2018)
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Peru (2021 - canceled due to Covid)
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South Africa (2019)
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Spain (2024)
For the most part, we talk about “just go where the box tells us” but we do make up a few rules before we draw each year based on what’s happening around the world. For example, Japan is in our box. Our anniversary is in April which was about a month after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011. We agreed that if we pulled Japan, we’d put it back in the box that year. But It’s a pretty high bar for the rules. We’ve never pulled a destination and just put it back because we didn’t like it.
Every year as we approach our anniversary, I get really excited to think about what we’ll pull from the box. We spend hours each year researching the destination we’ve pulled and I have a ton of fun planning the trips.
As we’ve shared this idea with friends and family, people love it. We have friends replicate the idea in different ways (like adding national parks instead of countries).
This box has become part of who we are as a married couple and has allows us to travel to six different continents together. We will continue to look forward to pulling from the box for the next 15 years and probably replenishing it with new destinations when the time comes!