Barbados!

After the wedding, we knew we wanted to relax after 1.5 years of planning, and a really intense final month. We wanted to do a big, two-week honeymoon somewhere exotic that would be really interesting and exciting, but knew that we couldn't pull off the planning directly after the wedding. Instead, we postponed the mega-moon til this August, when it's easier to get out of town, and decided to do a short mini-moon to Barbados directly after the wedding.

The timing was perfect- it took a couple days after the wedding to get the house back together, to get everything dropped off or picked up, to get the final bills paid and the last tasks done. Then, we were ready to pack and go!

We picked Barbados because we wanted a beach that was easy enough to get to from the East Coast to be a cheapish trip, but hard enough that it wouldn't be packed with tourists and screaming children. It was perfect- it's just about as far south as you can get in the Caribbean.

We picked the Colony Club hotel - (not thrilled about the name), which was amazing. It had a few pools, a swim-up bar, and sat right on the beach. After not-so-subtlely mentioning that we were on our honeymoon, they upgraded us to a room with a balcony right on the beach. It was amazing.

Our balcony above

Some of the pools

 This picture really sums it up well- reading, drinking, sitting under the umbrellas by the pools/beach. 

The weather was perfect. It rained every day briefly, which was just enough to keep it cool and give us a little shade.

Anyway- we mostly stayed at the hotel, and rotated between the pools, the beach and the balcony. At one point we ventured out of the hotel to find dinner and bumped into an old British guy who apparently came to vacation a few years ago and never left. This is where we discovered the joys of pouring a shot of rum on top of rum-raisin ice cream. It's pretty fantastic.

Our other excursion was a day sailing trip. I have this dream of taking a sailing cruise, with the wind in my face and a martini in my hand- I picture it being very Kennedy-esque. Whenever we go to the beach I insist on signing up for sailing cruise thinking that that's what I'll get, even though it never is. As was to be expected, as soon as we got to the boat, the crew started handing out rum punches (it's 9am at this point), pounding the dance club music, and the passengers all started stripping down to soak up the sun.

It was a bit less of this:

and more of this*:

- than I had in mind. It's not generally what I was hoping for, but still fun.

We stopped at two places to snorkel, one with sea turtles and one with a lot of fish and an old wreck. The ecologist in me says it's not ok to feed fish at places like this, it's artificial and confusing to the animals. The rest of me says- I got to touch a sea turtle!! At one point, we were completely swarmed in several schools of fish, swimming right on top of us. I poked my head up and discovered the crew was actually throwing chum at the top of my head. So, gross- but really cool from under water.

On the way back, the storms started rolling in, so we really picked up speed. We were flying over the waves, drinking our rum punches, and listening to this song, which became the theme song for the trip. Then a dance party broke out on top of the boat, which was sort of cheesy and sort of awesome.

All in all- an awesome trip and exactly what we wanted. We came back full of fish, generally relaxed and ready to plan honeymoon number 2.

*as a fun extra- you should know that Barbados is full of older British tourists.