Becky and I had always wanted our honeymoon to be in eastern Europe, and we knew we couldn’t make it work right after the wedding (since she had already booked some business travel), so we agreed to shelve it until the fall. Serendipity stepped in, and I was offered a speaking slot at the OpenBlend conference in Slovenia in September! So began our real honeymoon.

Our journey began, as they all do, at the Laurelwood Public House at PDX. There’s no better way to begin 22 hours of travel than with Space Stout and ketchupy hash browns.

Our first flight was uneventful, but when we boarded the Chicago ✈ Frankfurt leg, we found that our entertainment plans for the 8-hour journey were shot; there was no way to share an iPad screen across the aisle.

Our 2-hour stay in Frankfurt included about a mile of indoor walking at the airport and a terrible cup of coffee. A short flight later, we arrived in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In this shot, our bodies are pretty sure it’s 2am, but it’s almost lunchtime the next day.

We caught a ride to our hotel…

…and took a short nap, then I cabbed to a cool little absinthe bar in downtown Ljubljana. GitHub likes to throw drinking parties whenever anyone goes to a conference; this was my first time organizing one. I had tons of fun, met some crazy cool people, and didn’t get back to the hotel until around 11, about 33 hours after waking up!

The next morning was the conference! I was speaking right after the keynote, at 9am, so we didn’t get a huge, recuperative slumber yet. We caught a ride from my gracious hosts to a thousand-year-old castle, and did the projector/audio set-up dance.

I was pretty nervous.

But I think I did pretty well. If you really like this stuff, you can watch my presentation.

The food at this conference was outstanding, and the scenery was pretty nice, too.

Becky was pretty bored with all the computer nerdery. She went for a hike on the castle grounds right after my presentation ended, and caught a sense of the beauty of this place. Slovenia really is gorgeous.

After a long and informative day, we attended the crew-and-speakers dinner at a low-key restaurant with classic Slovenian fare. This is a horse steak.

Then we got to sleep.