Around The World: A Year of Dates!

Back in December, it was my husband’s 40th Birthday…one of the gifts that I created for him was an idea inspired by a post on Dating Divas. I thought it was such an awesome idea, and when I saw it I knew I’d have to do something similar for my husband :)

I present to you my Around The World: A Year of Dates gift that I gave to my husband for his 40th birthday!

In the months leading up to his birthday, I started throwing into conversation where in the world he would most like to travel. I managed to get lots of different destinations out of him, and used those as a basis for our dates.

Now, you might be wondering, how on earth I can afford a year of dates travelling round the world…well, I can’t, but what I can do is bring those cities and countries to us!

I started off by making a passport, using an image I found online. Inside I put his details – photo, name etc, you can just see the inside cover on this photo from an earlier post. I inserted a few blank pages for the ever-so-important passport visa stamps!

The post at Dating Divas had a link to some stickers that you could print off and use as passport stamps, but as cute as they are, there wasn’t all the places that we were going to “visit” available, so I had to look elsewhere! A little search brought up a website called Visastamper, which on the face of it seemed exactly what I needed – but I did have to faff around a bit, creating screencaps and editing in Photoshop, but I got there in the end. I then printed them onto a big sheet of sticker paper and then when it comes to using them, I’ll just peel them off and stick them into our passports.

If you want the easy option, go for the stickers – but work your dates around the destinations available :)

Up next was making the travel tickets! Again, Dating Divas provided a great link to create your own fake airline tickets. Just follow the instructions on the screen and in just a few minutes you’ll have your tickets! I changed up the airlines on mine, and found out the codes for the airports online (I’m such a geek!)

The next thing to do was to think up all of the travel itineraries for each of our dates. I’ve planned for one a month, with the date and destination written at the top of each itinerary. They involve going out to eat, staying in, cooking,crafting, watching movies, going on day trips…

Here are the countries/cities that we are “visiting” over the course of 2013…two of them are “in real life” as I booked for us to go to Bruges, Belgium in February, and we are going to Orlando, Florida in August :)

January – New Orleans, USA – Read about our Mardi Gras Night!
February – Bruges, Belgium – Read about our trip to Bruges! Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
March – New York, USA
April – Marakech, Morocco
May – Athens, Greece
June – Nairobi, Kenya
July – Madrid, Spain
August – Orlando, Florida
September – Rome, Italy
October -San Francisco, USA
November – Cancun, Mexico
December – Kingston, Jamaica

I bought a cute box to put everything into, along with some sweets and chocolates, and guide books for our visit to Belgium.

I wrote a letter to him explaining what his birthday present is, and I’m glad I did as he was quite bemused by it when he first unwrapped the gift!! The little suitcase box inside the bigger box holds the passport visa stamps, choccies and guide books!

I’ll be telling you more about each of the planned dates as the year goes by as I do plan on a bit of cooking and crafting to go along with each date. I’m seeing it as my one day a month when I can relax from my diet – to keep me sane! We get to have fun doing things that we probably wouldn’t normally do. I think, when in a long term relationship or marriage, it is easy to forget the little things – like dates – and I hope that this is going to bring that all back!

This would be a fab idea for not only a birthday, but for Valentine’s Day or Father’s Day or for any time you want to treat the special guy (or gal of course!) in your life.

I’m really excited about our 12 dates (even though the first one shows the 19th Jan, we had to postpone to the weekend after!) and had a lot of fun pre-planning them…as the year goes by I’ll be doing more in-depth planning!

I’ve got a L’Amour ♥ Board on Pinterest where I pin ideas for the one I love…why not come and follow me?

Follow The Purple Pumpkin Blog’s board L’Amour ♥ on Pinterest.

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