Ya mon

Yes, a new blog! What can we say, we have been so busy with day-to-day things and haven't been inspired to blog, but thanks to our extravagant trip, we finally have a good blog topic.

We just spent 6 nights in Jamaica. It was fabulous!!! We arrived at the Sandals Grande Ocho Rios resort too late on Tuesday to swim, but my sadness was quickly overcome because our room was upgraded for free! We booked THE cheapest room possible--inside the main building (hotel style) facing AWAY from the ocean. Our key let us into a 4 room villa with a bedroom, bathroom, a kitchenette, living room, and a patio/pool that we shared with the 3 other suites in our villa. The front desk lady called us when we got to our room to see how everything was, and I thanked her for the upgrade. She looked at what we had paid for and what we got and said, "Ooo--let me call you right back." I think they overbooked the cheap rooms, because we were allowed to stay in our mini-palace. According to the Internet quote, the villa was over $100 more expensive per night!! This is a photo of our patio.

Overall, we were ridiculously pleased with Sandals and feel like we got our money's worth there. I called the resort "summer camp for adults without counselors." The Jamaicans are SO unbelievably kind and the service was the best I have ever seen. The food was AMAZING. We ate some really spectacular things--my favorite meal was a Jamaican chicken dish made with coconut milk and this vegetable called cho-cho. Gary can't even decide on his favorite. I loved all the fresh fruits and vegetables. I might not have "made money" off the liquor, but I did off of how much fruit and vegetables I ate! Don't think everything I had was healthy--they also had some great cheese fries by the pool.

What did we do on our vacation? Not a whole lot! We were very lazy. Here was an average day for us (not that we had a watch)

8:30-9:00 get up and leave villa for breakfast buffet
9:00-9:45 breakfast buffet--YUM. We had the French toast every day and LOTS of fruit.
9:45-1:00 sit at pool or at beach, drinking fresh fruit smoothies from bar and reading books
1:00-1:45 lunch
1:45-5:00 sit at pool or at beach, drinking fresh fruit smoothies from bar and reading books
5:00-6:30 get ready for dinner, watch tv (Gary)
6:30-9:30 dinner
9:30 decide between going-out entertainment options and going to sleep (I told you we were lazy)

We learned some important lessons, namely that you can burn in the shade in Jamaica. I am convinced that the sun was so strong that we must have got sun through our suits--I don't even have a ring line and I wore my ring the WHOLE time. Gary barely has a ring line, either. We are a lot less red than two days ago, but we definitely burned. We used a lot of sunblock--another lesson learned is that I can't wear 15 SPF in the Caribbean. We sat under the umbrella the whole last day, and it did us in.

On Saturday we embarked on our ONE adventure: we climbed Dunn's River Falls. We didn't take any pictures of our own because we didn't feel like buying a waterproof camera, so the photos are ones I found on Google images. It was CRAZY. We came around a few bends and I looked at Gary and said, "Seriously--we're climbing that?" How it works is a group of climbers (about 20 for us) are assigned to a guide. Our guide was E. Paul. He walked barefoot ahead of us and we followed him, all holding hands in a big chain--it was boy-girl-boy-girl at the guide's instruction. I thought he was being cute, but it was actually so the guys could pull the women up these huge rocks.

We ascended 940 feet over the course of about an hour. We went on a day when no cruise ships docked, and our guide went slow, so we got a chance to look around at the scenery and frolic in the pools along the river. Another guy came with us, too, and he filmed our group and made us sing the "hot, hot, hot" song and say "ya, mon" on cue.

We loved the resort and the people we met. The country is poor and a lot of houses we saw were pretty run down. We weren't so fond of those people who we met outside the resort who just wanted every last cent we had. You just have to say no, but it made us uncomfortable. It didn't spoil our vacation, though; we just lived it inside of our resort's walls like the American tourists we were. We highly endorse Sandals resorts!!!

The dogs spent 8 nights at the local pet resort. They had a blast and are spending the day recuperating from all the running around that they did. I'm not sure they missed us or their home. Gary didn't miss the dogs or the house. I missed the dogs, but not the house.