Because I’m feeling really lazy this week (I blame jury duty), and because this week’s Illustration Friday is “Celebrate,” I’m going to repost the journal pages I sketched during my honeymoon in October, previously published on my old blog.

Text reads:

“The bed in Seattle is roughly three times the size of the sleeper car on the train. Sleeping on a train has some ups and downs (but more importantly: side to sides.) It’s more cozy than cramped, but when the train gets moving super fast at night, the bad spots on the track make the car lurch all over the place, and you kind of think the whole thing is going to tip over at 100 miles per hour. On better patches though, the motion is soothing, and once you get used to it, the train rocks you to sleep. At least until the next rough patch.”

“On the wedding day, Matt and I didn’t really have much time to enjoy our wedding cake. This cake was actually pretty tasty: yellow/choc. marble, Irish cream filling and normal buttercream icing. So we brought it with us. The first two nights on the train we retreated to our roomette-sleeper and had wedding cake with leftover sparkling grape juice. The warm grape juice was every bit as romantic/elegant as champagne.”
“Apparently, getting married is the best way to get lots of free champagne, wine, and best of all, chocolate.”

“I was warned that much of America is a whole lot of corn, wheat, grass, dirt, empty fields, grazing fields, scrubby plants or flat barren rock. Montana is boring. Kansas is horrifically boring. Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Utah, it’s amazing how many states are supposedly empty. There are many, many flat patches, but it seems like they go by quickly. And even these ’empty’ areas- miles of harvest lines or just broken fie4lds, had a beauty of their own. The wheat, on a clear day, really does look just like gold.”
“We did a lot of reading on the trip. We also brought some travel board games but didn’t play them. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Matt is reading or sleeping.”
“The first night on the train we stopped for no apparent reason in the middle of nowhere. For about an hour. I had a bit of Harry Potter PTSD. I was sure dementors were boarding the train.”
“Even after it started to fade, I kept getting comments on the henna. For some reason, I kept forgetting that I had henna, and it often took me a couple seconds to figure out what people were talking about. Interestingly, once we crossed an invisible line into the Northwest, the comments changed from ‘is it permanent?’ to, ‘Nice henna! Did you just get married?’

You can click on the images for a larger version. I’d like to pretend that these were “selections” from my honeymoon journal, but that’s pretty much all I managed. I guess that’s ok since I really had better things to do on my honey moon than journal. Maybe at some point I’ll get back into (read: get into) journaling, but so far I’ve not had much luck keeping up the habit.