This post is a bit late (I went on this trip in May and it’s now the end of August…) but I finally got to go on my first solo trip with my boyfriend of five years!

I really think that taking a vacation with someone really makes or breaks your relationship. It’s really that time that you spend together that tells you whether or not you’re compatible with the person or not. And after a week of New York spending every single day and every single hour together… I like to think that we aren’t doing so bad.

Here’s the story of how I got to go: when I was in Grade 12 and we had only been dating for around a year, I asked my mom when I would be able to go on vacation with Colin. Her response: “After you graduate university.” So I graduated this year, and before I graduated I told her, “So I’m graduating this year. I’m going to New York with Colin.”

She said that I had to graduate from graduate school before I could go. Which, in my opinion, was extremely unfair – she hadn’t mentioned this added on condition when we first agreed on this! Obviously I was angry, and left the topic for a few days. Then I just told her, “I’m going. Okay?” (But it wasn’t like she could stop me anyways and she knows it…)

Colin’s never been to New York before, but I’ve gone when I was in Grade 7 (and also another time before apparently, but I really can’t remember) – so that was around 9 years ago? And of course going on vacation with family when you’re a child is so different from going on vacation with a significant other or a friend. You find so many different things to do, and the dynamic of the vacation is completely different.

It’s now really hard for me to imagine not going on vacation with him any more because our methods of planning vacations are so similar – we plan things down to the tee, and then just scrap it in the end 😛 It works out better for us because in a city like New York that’s so busy, instead of taking our time looking at everything we’d rather walk a bit faster so we can take in more of the city. Good thing we both walk pretty fast! It’s also good because we’re okay with spending money on certain things but not others (for example, food…).

Colin and I both really like to try new foods, so our meals (more like snacks.. we rarely ate proper meals) were really important to us. I got to try Bubba Gump for the first time (he’s already gone before) after we watched a Broadway show together (so expensive but so worth it!). Normally he’s pretty strict on me eating snacks and ice cream and whatnot (ice cream is my favourite) but he was very very lenient and let us eat 2 ice creams in 1 day. On the same day we also ate 2 bagels and 2 slices of pizza.

I think the best thing about travelling with a significant other is that you can share everything you eat, meaning you can eat more and try more new things!

Going on vacation with Colin also helped me to learn to budget myself. Even though I don’t have a vacation budget (yet), I kept track of both my and his expenses, the shared and the separate. It’s helping me to become more money wise – and I had the chance to do this again when we went on another vacation with our friends a few week ago (blog post coming up soon!) to Disneyland!

I haven’t written in a very long time which is why this post is so messy and has no content.. but TL;DR: I went on vacation with my boyfriend, and learned a lot about me, him, and how to adult.