Honeymoon Time!!

Ok I am an idiot...I can admit all my "meg-isms" as Jeremy and my family call them. Anyway, Jeremy and I were trying to decide where we wanted to go on our honeymoon. We threw out several ideas including Costa Rica, Hawaii, St. Thomas and Aruba. I said that I thought we should go somewhere neither of us had been...so that got rid of Costa Rica and Hawaii. I said "I think Aruba would be fun, I've always wanted to go to Jamaica!" I am totally challenged when it comes to the world and where Countries are located, I totally slept through that part of High School. So you wonder where I get my geographical refrences from then?? Well, I guess everything I learned I learned from the Beach Boys...you know, 'Aruba, Jamaica c'mon let me take ya...' I figured they were naming cities inside of countries in that song. Ok you can stop laughing now :) We decided to go to Aruba anyway. I'm sure I will get to Jamaica one day! We flew out for our Honeymoon on 11/24/07 after we got sealed in the temple. However, we didn't have a direct through flight and ended up flying to Newark NJ and staying in a hotel that night. We woke up early the next morning and caught a flight to Aruba.

This is a view from the balcony of our Marriott condo. Jeremy's dad has a time share with Marriott and he traded his week and gave it to us. Thanks Garry!! The grounds were so nice...they had a few big pools and we could walk to the beach.

Jeremy showing off the big bedroom with the bathroom and nice jetted tub.

The whole place was awesome. It was decorated so nice and had a homey feel, it definitely wasn't a hotel feel. We had a kitchen which was so handy. We rode the bus into town a few times and got some groceries to cook a few lunches and dinners.

There were always geckos and lizards just running around by the pool. This isn't even a good picture of what we saw. Most of them were blue and green and really big!

We enjoyed a nice romantic dinner right on the beach! Wow! I can't even explain how awesome that was. The ocean was literally 5 feet from our table. We ate at the perfect time too....the sun was just starting to set and there were sail boats out on the ocean. It seriously doesn't get any more romantic that this! The only thing I would have changed was the menu :) I had no choice but to order fish...there were no other options! Jeremy can tell you I was a good sport and actually ate really expensive fish dinners 2 nights, apparently both restaurants on the beach don't know how to cook anything but fish...or maybe they were just known for their fish? Either way, I survived!! Poor Jeremy was dying, all he wanted to do was eat some shrimp but couldn't because he's alergic to it. He snuck a few here and there and luckily didn't end up in the hospital...that would really have ruined my trip (ha ha)

The beach had these really nice huts all over, just in case you wanted to get out of the sun I guess?? Who would want to do a thing like that??

Jeremy and I had so much fun playing shuffle board. Who said shuffle board was just for old folks living in retirement homes in Florida? It was right outside of the doors you use to get to our room...so we played it every day. It got pretty competitive, but I'm pretty sure I won almost every time :)

We played some checkers one night while we were waiting for a table at a restaurant. I also got eaten alive by mosquitos that night. When I get on the other side I am going to ask God what he was thinking when he created mosquitos!!

We went on a fun snorkeling tour. It was such a beautiful day with the best weather. It rained a day or two we were there so we were lucky to have such nice weather snorkeling. We took a boat out to the middle of the ocean where there is an old sunken ship that we explored. It was actually pretty creepy at times to see the big ship and realize people used to be on it...YIKES! I get motion sickness sometimes just from being on a boat and in the water all day snorkeling...I don't see how these people did it taking advantage of all the free alcohol on board. At least it was entertaining for us :)

You can't tell me we weren't even close to Jamaica...doesn't this bus scream Jamaica mon' ?? This was the "fun bus" that took us to get our ATV's for another fun tour.

I love this picture. For any of you who have seen the movie Dumb & Dumber, that is what this picture reminds me of! It's hard to take a picture of yourself, obviously I didn't get the ATV in the picture, but we were on the ATV tour.

I have to be honest...Aruba was pretty Ugly! As you can see from these pictures, it's basically a dry, desert island with cactus and dirt. We saw plam trees and pretty flowers on the Marriott grounds and that was about it.

The ATV ride was really fun. We rode around most of the island and stopped at a natural pool that we all hiked down to and went for a swim to cool off. Then we rode to another neat place where there was a really old bridge and a stopped at a place to buy a drink. We saw a lot of these tiny crabs crawling around everywhere.

We had a blast on the tour...definitely worth sitting through a Marriott presentation to get $100 to use towards any activity! We tortured ourselves though and made the 90 minutes presentation drag out to a 240 minute presentation...we made the mistake of acting interested and getting roped into feeling guilty and having to say every five minutes "NO, we still can't afford to buy into this."

The last day :( This was taken while we were waiting for our Taxi to take us to the airport, we had checked out and the trip was over- but we will always have the memories!