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 loved about Annemarie was her belief that each couple should take something tangible away from their wedding - a memento of the commitment they’re making.
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. After we sent back the survey, she put together our wedding vows and sent them to us a couple of months before the wedding so we could review them.
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 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 actually ended up with 32. We spent hours looking over maps and talking about the places we wanted to see together.
At our wedding, we pulled the first destination which was Argentina. Since then, the box has taken us to:
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Argentina (2011)
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Australia (2012)
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Caribbean (2013)
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Belgium (2014)
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Morocco (2015)
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Indonesia (2016)
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France (2017)
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Panama (2018)
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South Africa (2019)
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Czech Republic (2020 - canceled due to Covid)
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Peru (2021 - canceled due to Covid)
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Egypt (2022)
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New Zealand (2023)
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Spain (2024)
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Chile (2025)
- Norway (2026 - planned)
- India (2027 - planned)
For the most part, we live by “just go where the box tells us,” but we do agree on a few rules before we draw each year based on what’s happening in 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 that year, we’d put it back in the box. But it’s a pretty high bar - we’ve never pulled a destination and put it back simply because we didn’t like it.
Every year as our anniversary approaches, I get really excited thinking about what we’ll pull from the box. We spend hours researching the destination we’ve drawn, and I have a ton of fun planning the trip that follows.
As we’ve shared this idea with friends and family over the years, people have loved it. Some friends have even replicated the idea in different ways, like creating boxes focused on national parks instead of countries.
This box has become part of who we are as a married couple and has allowed us to travel to six different continents together. We’ll continue looking forward to pulling from the box each year for the next 15 years - and will probably replenish it with new destinations when the time comes.
Want to create your own Box Trip?
I’ve put together a few printable Box Trip starter kits so you can set one up at home. They’re available in my Etsy shop if you’d like to try it yourself.