First International Trip With My Husband - What Could Go Wrong Besides Everything?

My buddy and I leave for Italy and Croatia on Tuesday of next week, provided the coming snowmageddon doesn't decimate the airport and cause the disintegration of the last scraps of our already crumbling New England infrastructure. Should I just go to the airport now? This trip is our delayed honeymoon. We've been married for a little over 8 months and have recently decided to go ahead and stay married. I'm very lucky. We'll hit Florence, Venice, Trieste, the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia and then Rome.

With my recent stomach issues and having to ban wheat, gluten, dairy, soy and awesomeness from my diet, I've been concerned about getting sick on the trip because that is much more likely to happen than me just controlling myself and not eating trigger foods like bread, pasta, garlic and gelato. The one to truly suffer through all of this will be my husband because I love to complain and whine and if I throw up, he'll probably have to watch. Throwing up in Italy is much more romantic than throwing up in America. We'll be in Florence for Valentine's Day - a holiday only slightly less meaningful to me than Pongal, the Hindu festival celebrating the gradual increase of the length of the day, marking the sun's auspicious journey northwards. An old Italian tradition dictated that unmarried girls had to wake up very early on Valentine's Day and look for men walking by because on Valentine's Day, a man is said to marry the first unmarried girl he sees within a year's time. Dang, I'm like wiki-jewia today. Anyway, my point is, Valentine's Day is stupid and I'm going to be sick from eating my weight in gelato by then.

We're excited for all of the sight-seeing, being away from his annoying phone that never shuts up and any reminders of American politics, but terribly worried about leaving our two cats, Rocky and Ruth Bader Catsburg. Rocky is a senior cat and very clearly has dementia, so in the time we're gone, could easily forget who we are. Ruth is slightly vengeful and could burn down the building. We've hired a cat sitter, who is equipped with inane instructions about where to scratch who and when. While the cats could take a while to forgive us for leaving them, they don't know that the day we come home, we're getting a puppy. They're going to be so pissed. We've already started setting up the "nursery" and put in a crate and new doggie bed. In reality, we're very worried about leaving them and we're having our friends drop by our apartment to make sure our cats are actually being looked after and not lying in dead heaps by their empty food bowls while our television and other electronics are missing.