Mr. & Mrs.

Were back!

Ok real quick an update on wedding pictures. I don't have the professional ones back yet, I won't have them til next week so as soon as I have them I will post them so for now I'm going to do it backwards and put the honeymoon up first.

Honeymoon
We went on a cruise with Royal Caribbean to the western caribbean from sunday August 31st to sunday Sep 7th. We flew to Miami the Saturday after the wedding and spent the night there and then sailed out Sunday afternoon. We spent the first day at sea and the second day we were supposed to stop in Labadee, Haiti but the captain decided it wasn't safe to go there because of the hurricane Hanna. So we also spent the second day at sea, which was fine with us cuz the ship is so huge we had tons to do.

About the ship- Freedom of the Seas, she is currently the largest cruise ship in the world able to hold about 5,000 customers (not including all the staff). We had 4,200 on ours of which only 1,200 were American! I didn't realize how international the ship would be. 600 were from Venezuela and the break down of the rest was about 25-40 passengers from 40 other countries. The ship itself is 14 stories high it has a rock climbing wall, a surfing simulator, a movie theatre, a chapel, 3 pools, a casino... on and on.

This is the ship taken by me when we were in Jamaica.

The stateroom we stayed in was really nice and much more spacious then we had heard they are. We had the large bed, a vanity, closet, tv, bathroom and the port hole.

And the food! I learned that cruise ships are known for their gourmet food and wow we took advantage of that, they had so much that was freely available between the cafe and room service we ate 4 times a day haha.

So our first stop was in Jamaica- what a nightmare!!! In the picture below you can see the Ocho Rios port. The long sidewalk that comes out of the right corner is the gangplank. The moment we stepped off that we were mobbed by tourist agencies and vendors and taxi drivers, it was absolute chaos.

Finally we were able to get on a shuttle with a big group and head over to Dunns River Falls which is a beautiful very very very large cascading river- you can see it behind us in the picture. After which we went swimming and I hunted sea shells. Jamaica was very green and the most like a rainforest of the islands we stopped at.

I say it was a nightmare because while walking around the falls or even when we were down at the beach we had locals coming up trying to sell us souvenirs and weed, (actually having someone take this picture of us with our own camera cost us $3), and we had to say no 4 or 5 times to each person and then when we did they would get angry with us, I felt really unsafe, that the constant pressure overshadowed the fun of being on the island. We won't ever be going there again.

The next day we stopped in Grand Cayman and did some shopping then went to Stingray City and touched and held stingrays!!!

In the picture below is Stingray City. We are on a sandbar that is 20 min from shore and there are about 5 boats worth of tourists that get out into the water with about 20 stingrays that are really gentle and playful, we could pet them and feed them, and the boat drivers help everyone pick one up and hold it while they take a picture (for a fee of course). After which the driver took us to another reef to snorkel. This whole day was sooo neat for me cuz of my sea animals fetish haha.

That night we dressed up and went to the ships specialty restaurant Chops Grille and had amazing steak and service of a 5 star restaurant. The specialty restaurants are neat because we just pay a cover charge to get in and then we could order as much food as we wanted to try.

The last port we stopped in was Cozumel, Mexico. It was my favorite stop, we rented a scooter and drove down the coast to a little surf shop right on the reef and had authentic mexican food while we went snorkeling. We saw some BIG fish at this reef.

This is a video of the surf shop we spent the day at.

And thats everything. We had one last day at sea on our way back into Miami of which we slept most of the day, we were so wiped out from the week.

Here is a link to watch a slideshow of all the pictures of stuff we did in between what I highlighted in this post:

http://s464.photobucket.com/albums/rr8/racingharwards/?action=view&current=71295c0e.pbw