Last November I married my wonderful husband and the very next day we left for our honeymoon. He had never left the country before (despite having gone to Alaska he flew from the US into Alaska, who does that!?) so I was determined to make that happen for our honeymoon. Which is how we found ourselves aboard the (at least at that time) largest cruise ship in the world, the Allure of the Seas, for 7 days while we visited exciting and exotic Caribbean locations.
Life
is a constant adventure. Some of our adventures are more exciting or
life changing than others. But even those small adventures, those
"blips" in your day or week, add up. Those small moments that seem
insignificant add up to become the real force of change and growth in
your life.
First stop the Bahamas! After a crazy adventure of last minute booking our excursion (that's the fancy name for what cruises call planned trips) then following what it said and then finding out we'd in fact missed the only bus to take us to our excursion by several hours we finally made it to Atlantis which is on Paradise Island. It really was very beautiful, minus our inability to enter the waters on the beach due to red flags. We bought a crazy overpriced drink in a coconut shell, that was truly AMAZING. I fought my husband over those meager 3 ounces (maybe not much of an exaggeration, truth being told) because they were pure gold! The aquariums were really great as well, we went for the unguided tour (saved good money for an already expensive excursion just simply for the Atlantis entrance fee) but were able to skim around other tours going on to get the fun info!
Onto the US Virgin Islands, St. Thomas to be exact. Our excursion (this time we cheated the system and booked it ourselves with a private company not through the ship and saved a bundle! thank you interwebs!) was a guided bus tour through the islands, a few hours shopping in the city downtown, and a few hours on a world renowned beach. Whenever you go on a cruise to a Caribbean island all the locals think you must be crazy loaded. It's fun to play a game of playing tourist, of a crazy rich tourist like they all think you are! "Oh no honey, I'm not sure about this {$80,000} necklace. You did say I could get one treat this trip but I'm just not sure this is it." I know it's a bit cruel to the salesmen thinking they may have scored a great deal for a sucker from the states but it's still a fun game to play! And suffice it to say we bought nothing crazy, just trinkets and magnets. But the view from the mountain top was amazing and so was the view on the beach at Magen's Bay. As we came in the morning it'd rained and it scared most of the other tourists away. Which turned out great because the beach only had a few hundred people, instead of thousands, like it would have had.
Even though we'd had a day at sea by the time we reached the French/Dutch St. Martin/St. Maarten we were too exhausted to do an entire day entire island adventure like we'd had planned. So instead we totally ditched the excursion and rolled off the ship when we felt like it, walked to the nearest city, and just rambled through the town. It really was a beautiful island but the heat was oppressive and it wasn't even an unusually hot day (for them at least). And this is coming from the girl that grew up in Miami! Anyway after looking around the many shops, taking a break for some tropical drinks (so yummy!), we were ready to go back to the ship, but too lazy to walk the mile back. So we took a boat taxi!
Not to be outdone by any one destination we had two more days aboard the boat before our honeymoon ended. And that ship is a vacation all on it's own! We ate on the Johnny Rockets on the ship (yes it seriously has one) and my husband, ever the go-go-go always busy guy, was almost always on the sports deck playing something. Each time he competed and was first or second place he'd get a gold or silver metal. He got a lot of gold medals. And since the sports deck was next to the pool deck where our table mates for dinner would spend their days (sunbathing and getting crazy drunk) we'd always pass by them when he got another medal. The last night one of the guys had made the kids station give him craft supplies and he made that award medal for my husband. The smaller award he made for me, it says "side kick" since most of the time I was just sitting on the sidelines watching. (Napping or reading or just watching in the shade was so much more fun!) Most of the craziness wasn't documented, we were having too much fun to take a picture. So things not captured: there's a rock climbing wall, zip line across the ship, water theatre (think Cirque du Solei), Broadway equivalent theatre, ice skating rink, surf simulator, mini golf, and so much more! Then we finally came back to reality, sort of.
We spent the next week with my parents on our extended vacation since Thanksgiving was that week. So much build up to the wedding and then such a great long honeymoon/vacation afterwards. It was so incredibly hard to drive the 8 hours back home and return to work and real life!
No comments:
Post a Comment