All about the Honeymoon

Okay, well now that I am all about this site and wanted to spend some time posting pictures, I've spent my morning loading pictures into the computer and playing around on here instead of going to work. I've still got the second half of the day for that, right? :)

I got a request from Granny to talk some about the honeymoon, so here we go. We got to San Juan at about 6:30pm on Sunday the 8th and had to take a short bus ride to the port where we boarded the Carnival Destiny ship and got right into our awesome room which was a suite with a balcony. It was huge! We didn't have our luggage yet as they take it from you and probably xray it and all that fun stuff before returning it to your room. So we decided to walk around for a few minutes until the emergency evac practice started around 9:15pm. That was so not fun, it was hot and sweaty out there and with everyone crammed in with huge lifejackets on, you had no room to even turn around. So that lasted probably 20 minutes, and by 10 or so we had set sail to our first destination of St. Thomas!

St. Thomas was awesome, the locals are really nice, and there were actually quite a few Americans that lived there. For instance our shore excursion guy was about 30 and from Michigan and said he'd just moved to St. Thomas 2 months prior because he got sick of the snow. Haha. Wish I could just pack up and move to the Carribean! So anyways, Jeff and I went on a Catamaran sail to St. John for our excursion where we laid out on the boat for the hour sail there, snorkled on a private beach, and sailed back with some free food and champagne! It was awesome.

Second day was in Dominica where we went river tubing. So fun, you have to try it! The locals there are fun and speak sort of like Jamaicans and just want you to have a fun time. We both got really bad burns on our arms that day (the lifejackets covered the rest of us) because we forgot the sunscreen. Woops! But I would definitely do it again, it got the adrenaline moving. We didn't get to do any shopping that day because when we got back on the ship we had lunch and took a nap, and the ship left at 5pm so there wasn't much time left. So no souvenir shot glass from that stop! Oh well.

Third day was Barbados. One of my favorite stops! We saw the whole island on a 4X4 safari island tour with a stop for some free rum punch. It was really beautiful there, white sandy beaches with huge rock formations, fields of sugar cain, and really nice locals with funny accents. They grow a lot of local fruit there too, and we would stop along the tour to pick it off the trees and try it. We picked up some of the local rum from there too, one of the most popular and oldest in the carribean, called Mount Gay Rum. Funny, I know. Have yet to try it though. We also did some shopping and headed back to the port for debarkation!

Fourth day (Thursday) was our stop in St. Lucia. I was pretty bummed that day because it was our first day of no shore excursions and it kept raining off and on. We finally got a chance to go out and do a bit of shopping, but that was it. We got some nice views from the ship of the beautiful trees with big orange flowers on them, and lush mountains with houses sticking out here and there. Jeff and I say we are going to go back and stay since we didn't get a chance to really see the island.

And finally the last major day was to Antigua, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The locals here were most annoying, offering this and that and wanting to take you around in their taxis. But it was still a lot of fun. They had some of the best shopping and here we were actually able to walk around the town quite a bit. Visited an old cathedral and graveyard, went to the Antigua Museum, and saw a few funny locals dancing to the music. We had $3 cans of Diet Coke at a bar called Cheers which actually tasted kind of wierd, seeing as they were made in the Carribean. haha. It was a fun day.

Saturday was a "Fun day at Sea" where we spent 6 hours at the pool and went down the huge slide about 5 times. It was a great way to end the week. We got back to San Juan around 8am the next Sunday morning. Jeff and I had already planned to stay the night there so that we could do some sight seeing of Puerto Rico, so we headed off to our hotel and unloaded. The day of sightseeing was awesome and I think I even spoke a couple words of spanish to one of the locals. haha. We went to some old forts from the Spanish-American wars, went to Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, and shopped in Old San Juan for most of the day. I would love to go back and see more of the area.

We got back to Indiana around 8:30 Monday night and headed straight to Ft. Wayne to spend our first night in our new home! And we've been non-stop ever since.

So as you can see, we had a wonderful Honeymoon filled with experiences we will remember forever. It was perfect from beginning to end.