Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Barbados & St Lucia

I started my new job and have been working for my new company for a month now. I will be traveling a lot, and I am currently on my first trip in beautiful San Diego! What a great way to start huh? Ive been here 3 days now, and Im getting pretty excited to go home and see the new hubs. On a quick side note, I can not believe how much CRAP is on TV. I rarely have time for TV, but since my evenings are pretty open now and I dont dare to go out too late once the sun goes down, Ive watched a few hours of TV. BORING. Its either all crime shows, Mitt Romney Vs whoever, and baking shows (which is kind of fun). I got out of the shower last night and had left the TV on and "The Black Swan" or dark swan..whatever, was playing. I literally watched it for 10 min and was terrified. What a dark, crazy movie. My suggestion to any of you havent seen it, dont!!
I am in the heart of down town San Diego and in the CUTEST hotel room ever.
The bedspread on the bed is the exact one I wanted at Crate & Barrel.
I seriously could live in this room. Wanna see what Im looking at right now?
Ok, it doesnt look as pretty from my crappy Iphone, but it is!
I need to get the energy to get out of this room and grab some dinner. Russ bought me 2 containers of mase, so Im good to go.
Back to what I came to blog about. Our honeymoon!
Barbados was pretty. We hopped off the ship and went straight to a beach.
I seriously cant stand it when you are on a beach and have a million people trying to sell you something. We walked along the beach and found a spot that was away from people. We instantly jumped into the ocean.
Within seconds of returning to our towels, we had vendors coming out of the wood works trying to sell us anything and everything..Jet ski tours (which we almost did) bird houses out of coconuts, jewelry, pot...you name it. As soon as one walked away, someone else was right at our feet. SO annoying.
By the end, we couldnt help but just laugh.
Russ and I were facing each other and he could see who was approaching by looking at the reflection in my sunglasses. He could see someone coming so we both pretended like we were sleeping. "Excuse me! Looking at these bird houses!!! New addition, only one left!". That didnt work. So much for relaxing on the beach.

We walked down the beach a ways where it was more crowded and found a yummy place to eat!
I cant remember what it was that we ate, we just asked for the most authentic Barbadian (is that a word?) food and it was DElicious.
There was a lot more people down this way, but less of a chance of being bugged!! Plus, there were cool looking sail boats
Russ took this super awesome picture of this sea turtle! The settings on the camera must have been weird, because we havent altered this photo at all, isnt it pretty cool?
Barbados was cool. I thought the water was really pretty, I enjoyed watching some locals play soccer on the beach and I enjoyed our meal. Overall, I cant say I would jump at the chance to return. I think its hard to really give it chance when you are only there for a day, and you only see one tiny part of what Im sure it has to offer, but the beach vendors were a major turn off to me. Thank goodness I had a handsome man next to me and we could just laugh it off.
Either way, who could complain about warm weather, clear water and seeing a new place?
That night was formal night. Russ had lobster and prime rib, I had ribs.

Every night on the menu there was a "Dija" item, like "did ya". There was frog legs, shark, escargot, and other weird things. Russ of course tried them all. I tried the shark, but I couldnt do the puny frog legs.

ST LUCIA-

St Lucia was kind of a bust. I feel bad too, because its the island Russ was most excited to see.
As soon as we got off the ship, it was total mayhem. All these guides were trying to trap you into their van and take you for a tour of the island. One guy would promise us one thing, another guy would promise another, but they worked for the same company. Anyway, long story short, we told one of the guys that we were happy to see his tour, but all we wanted to do was end up at a beach. He said ok, so we hopped in with 5 other couples.
The plan was to hit his stops and then end up at the beach and we would pay him. We were supposed to stop at a banana plantation, a water fall, hot pots, and a few other places.
But what really happened, was he would speed past a banana plantation and tell us all to look out the window.
And then he would take us to MORE street vendors.
Isnt it beautiful though?

I got to hold this cute kitten while the others were shopping
In the end, our "tour" ended up being us driving for almost 6 hours around the island. I got SO so car sick. It was long, windy, narrow roads and a bunch of tour vans trying to pass each other
So the tour itself was like $40 each, and then every time he stopped, you had to pay even more to get in to where ever he was stopping.
Here we were at the hot pots. Russ and I thought it sounded crazy to pay another $30 for 5 bucks to see hot pots. Plus, being extremely car sick, the last think you want to smell, is sulphur.
So we sat on the side of the road and ate pretzels trying to calm are bellies.
We got back in the van and everyone was SO mad. They thought it was a waste of time and money. Our driver told us he was going to now take us to a beautiful waterfall. We pulled up to the waterfall and he wanted to charge us all again to get in and he was just going to drive us around.
By now, everyone was really ticked and thats when the fight started.
The driver told us it was time to start driving back to the dock and then everyone REALLY got mad.
An hour and a half later he pulls up at the ship and everyone got on the street and started fighting. Russ and I just sat back and watched and wanted out of there, but the others were telling us not to pay him because he just charged us all to drive around the island for 6 hours, no food, no drinks included, and no beach! So after like a half an hour of fighting on the street and gathering a scene, we paid him and left.
So poor Russ, didnt really get to see much of the island except in the back of a carsick van.
As soon as we got back on the ship, we of course ran straight for the pizza and enjoyed the beautiful sunset!

We sure had fun that night! We enjoyed playing games on board and of course...eating! Check out this gourmet burger!

Speaking of food, I should go get some!

Thursday, January 26, 2012

St Thomas/St John

We love going on cruises. We love traveling and going to really remote places, but its fun every once in a while to do a cruise and not have to think about a thing except what you are going to eat and what excursion to do.
Speaking of cruises, how crazy was that cruise that sunk in Italy? That captain better be in so much trouble..what was he thinking? I feel so bad for all those people that died and are missing. One of the couples I read about was an older couple that saved up after putting 3 kids though private school. First night out, the captain decides to be an idiot.
Anyway, back to happier thoughts, St Thomas!
St Thomas was our first stop on our cruise. We actually didn't stay in St Thomas, we took a bus to the other side of the island and hopped on a boat to go to a little island off of St Thomas called St John.
What a fantastic place. Right after pulling in to St John, we stopped at this little shack on the side of the road and ordered a fresh fruit smoothie to cool us down before our hike.

We hiked for about a mile in this thick brush, and all of the sudden...we arrived to "Honeymoon Beach". We figured we couldn't come all this way and not go to Honeymoon Beach on our honeymoon! It was worth it!

We had a little bit of rain while we were on the beach, but I don't mind rain when you are swimming in the water and the outside temperature is still in the 80's.
Russ snorkeled for a bit
While I read.
After hanging out for a few hours, it was time to hike back and get ready to make our way back to the ship.
Goodbye St John
Streets of St Thomas at the port where I got a "genuine" pearl for 2 bucks :)
While everyone was taking pictures of beautiful St Thomas, we were busy shoving our faces with pizza. When I think of a cruise, I think of 24 hr pizza. My very favorite part. We at least when on deck while we were eating it.


St Thomas/ St John in a nutshell. Now that we had a huge piece of pizza to "hold us over" time to get ready for dinner!

Monday, January 23, 2012

Honeymooners!

We had so much fun on our honeymoon! After all that planning and stress leading up to the wedding, it was so nice getting away for 10 days and relaxing in the sun.
We spent a couple days in Puerto Rico before hopping on the ship for a cruise around the Virgin Islands.
Old San Juan, Puerto Rico is such a cute little town. I loved it! The buildings are so cool and bright, and the city was so easy to get around on foot.
We flew in and started off our day with lunch on the beach. We had just had an overnight flight and I dont sleep on planes, so please excuse my not so fresh look.
Caribbean pizza! Yum.

We had a lot of fun walking around the city. Every time we turned the corner I fell in love with another building.
For those of you that dont know me, or havent been in our house, I LOVE color. Almost every room in my house is a different color, so this was my kind of city.



I loved this old lady hanging out of her window, with an ice cream cart under her window. Right across from her window was the old Fort right along the ocean.
Hanging out at the old Fort. It was really cool! It had some cool little brick ways and hide outs!


There was a huge open field of grass right above the ocean. For some reason, it felt wrong not to do a cartwheel.
But when I did it, it definitely didnt feel right! If you haven't done a cartwheel in years, I challenge you to do it. It hurt so bad.
I love looking back at pictures we took. For some reason, of all the beauty around us, we both felt it necessary to take a picture of each other, taking a picture.

I thought this was a cool cemetery. Its not often you see a cemetery right on the ocean front.
We enjoyed some delicious Puerto Rican food. I had Moofonga, which is basically a plantain base with meat on top, and Russ enjoyed a 10 lb box of bread pudding.

Russ swam in the ocean for a little bit while I took a nap on the beach. I cant think of anything better then taking a nap on the beach, especially when there is a perfect ocean breeze so you're not too hot.
Down by the fort every Sunday they have a huge kite flying day. It was so fun to hang out in this huge open field with hundreds of kites flying everywhere and a pretty sunset.
We went out on the town that night. They closed down the streets and had a big market with lots of food and live music. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of energy.
We walked down to the beach for a while.

Russ saw a crab in the sand, and I only wish I knew how to explain how funny it was watching him try and catch this crab. There were people out on the balcony above us and I bet they thought he had gone mad.
He was crawling all over the ground going a million miles an hour and jerky every which way as the crab tried to get away, but it was dark so you couldnt tell what he was doing.
He finally caught it, and it wasn't happy! It sliced Russ's finger open. I was surprised how deep it was!
I guess the city had a ton of rats and mice so they brought in cats to control the pesky little rodents. The cats ended up taking over the city. There were cats everywhere! Sleeping on all the cars, and walking about the streets. This one was my favorite.. bat cat.
Since it was our first night on our trip we decided to get some sparking cider and sit up on the balcony and see the city life.
Russ could not get the bottle open. He twisted and turned the cork forever and couldnt get it to open.
I was laughing so hard and taking pictures of him trying to open it, when it literally shot 30 ft in the air. You can see the panicked look on Russ's face. It hit the top of the building, bounced off the side and ended right back to his feet. I seriously laughed forever.
That night around 1am we woke up to this huge crashing sound. We both woke up in a complete panic. For some reason, the city was setting off these huge fireworks in the middle of the night, and because of the tall buildings, the sound was amplified like crazy. We seriously thought we were being bombed.
The next day, we spent around the city and hopped on our cruise that night leaving Puerto Rico!

Next stop.. St Thomas!