Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Jamaica - Day 3

If you missed part one of our trip, you can read about it HERE

For the weeks leading up to our trip, one of the things that I was looking forward to the most was sleeping in.  With two young kids at home, "sleeping in" is a relative term; usually Matt and I are happy if we get to sleep until 7!  Of course, the first morning of the trip, can you guess what time I woke up?  Yep.  7am Georgia time.  6am Jamaica time.  I guess old habits die hard!  Thankfully, I was feeling a lot better than the night before.  I'm not usually a big breakfast person, but after the issues from lack of food the night before, we knew I needed to start my day off with something to eat!  Our resort only does buffets for breakfast and lunch (and then at dinner you can choose buffet or a la carte), so we headed to one of the buffets for breakfast.

This was our view walking out of our villa.  Can you see the ocean through the trees?  Not a bad sight to see first thing in the morning!



Breakfast for me: an omelet, pancake, and bacon.  Yum!  One of my favorite things to eat is an omelet.  At the buffet, they had an omelet station set up and you could get them to make you one with several options.  This morning I had an omelet with ham, cheese, and mushroom.  It was so good!

This is a view of about 1/3 of the pool from where we ate breakfast.

After breakfast we headed to the lobby of the resort to check in with the kids.  They only have wi-fi in the lobby (you can pay to have access to it anywhere).  We chose not to pay for wi-fi access everywhere because we really wanted to "unplug" for this vacation.  Not having access anywhere but the lobby really forced us to keep with that.  

Can you see the ocean behind him?  So pretty!


Chairs by the pool.

We tried to get a picture of both of us with the background to send to the kids.

After breakfast and checking in with the kids, we headed back to the villa to change for a morning on the beach!  When you walk in the villa, this is the view that you see.  It's completely open inside to the sky, and it's three stories tall.  We were on the ground floor.  If you look all the way to the back, we were the room on the left corner.  We loved it!

I was worried about being able to find a chair at the beach since the resort said that they were almost at full capacity.  But we got there plenty early in the morning (thanks to me getting up at 6am!) to find some lounge chairs.  

Perfect view!



Matt had so much fun walking around and looking for things.  One of the first things he found was (dead) brain coral.  

So so so beautiful!

While Matt looked around and swam in the ocean, I was perfectly content to lounge and read my kindle.


We spent all morning at the beach.  Around 11 we headed back to the room to change and rest before lunch.  We took a little 30 minute nap, a little shower, and ate lunch (again at a buffet).  After lunch, we headed to a different beach (the resort had lots to choose from) where they offered water sports.

This beach was definitely more crowded than the one we had been at in the morning.  We kind of went to the side away from the crowd and it wasn't as busy.


Matt loves to snorkel, and I have enjoyed it before.  We rented some snorkel equipment, but I ended up not using it.  The part of the water near the beach was pretty cloudy, and I was having some anxiety about swimming out far enough for it to be clear.  I also knew that Matt would want to snorkel way longer than I would, so I just enjoyed laying on the beach while he snorkeled his heart out.

Can you find him in the next three pictures?



We stayed on the beach all afternoon until it was time to go get ready for dinner.  You have to get a little dressed up for dinner, so we knew we needed time to really shower and change.  One the way back to our villa, we stopped at a little overhang with a gazebo to take some pictures.  This is a view of our specific villa from the overhang.  The beach to the right of this picture is the one that you can see from our balcony outside of our room.  We never did visit this beach because it didn't have as great of a view and it was a nude one - haha.

This is a view of the beach that we just left where Matt snorkeled.

One thing that really surprised me (that you can see in this picture) is how mountainous Jamaica was.  I had just figured that it would be flat and beachy everywhere.  Not at all.  There were mountains and cliffs everywhere.  It was beautiful!



On the way back to the room, we stopped by one of the pool bars and got a "strawberry thing, no rum" - haha.  It was my absolute favorite drink of the trip.  I couldn't even count how many I had.

We took showers and got ready for dinner.  I was so happy not to be feeling bad on the way to dinner this night.


Passing by the pool on the way to dinner.

I loved how the pool didn't take away from the view of the ocean at all.


The night before we ate at the steakhouse.  This night, we wanted to try out the Italian restaurant.  When we got there, they weren't quite open yet, so we just sat down to wait.  


It was such a beautiful evening!  The dome in the background is where the lobby of the hotel was.  Everything between where we were and the lobby was all restaurants/buffets.

We waited for a while, but they still weren't open.  We decided to leave and go back to the steakhouse.  I really didn't get to enjoy my dinner the night before, and Matt is always down for steak, so we headed up there.  When we got there, we had about a 30 minute wait.  We enjoyed watching the sun set over the ocean while we waited!



We sent this picture to the kids.






Dinner went so much better this night, and it was so good!  Matt got lamb chops and I got a hamburger.  We both loved what we got; it was amazing!



It really was a perfect day!  Perfect weather, great food, a beautiful view, and amazing company.  How could it get any better??

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1 comment:

Emily said...

SOOOO beautiful!!! That resort looks AMAZING! and, duh, I'm ALL about the fruity drinks!!!! So glad y'all had such a fabulous time!!!! Jealous!