Honeymoon: Day 7 Around Town & Day 8

The day after Michael and Amanda's wedding was supposed to be the "Wedding 2.0 recovery day" for all of the wedding guests, which would involve relaxing at the beach by their hotel. Again, since it was an all inclusive resort we figured we might have an issue getting in.

We started the morning trying out a different restaurant on the resort than we had, "Del Lago." It was a little more expensive but it was amazing with a much better breakfast buffet than the other restaurants on the resort. They also featured fresh made, all natural juices which were pretty fantastic, such as a cactus cantaloupe blend I tried.

One adorable part about all of the restaurants was that they did not have walls, they were open to nature, and so there were always birds hanging around, which I am sure some people would find gross, but again since I am a bird crazed person, I greatly enjoyed having them around. They had to keep covers on top of baskets that they kept the sugar packets in because the birds would come and steal them. At this restaurant there were also iguanas and other lizards chilling along the rocks a long the outskirts of the restaurant.

After a fanatastic breakfast we got out selves ready and decided to take a trip to downtown Playa del Carmen to check out the shopping and culture. The shop keepers are extremely overwhelming and are definitely using some high pressure sales tactics. I am not a fan of being places without set prices where there are bartering systems because I always felt like I  was getting cheated. We did get a few small things, such as magnets and T shirts for my parents, and some tequila for my sister and our friend Bruce who was puppy sitting for us in our absence. 

We also checked out the beach in down town Playa del Carmen, which was phenomenal. Unlike the beach at our hotel, there were no rocky reefs. We did not come prepared to really stay on the beach but it was nice to walk along the sand and get some more rays. 

Once we were done surfing the strip we headed to the hotel where everyone else was staying for the wedding in attempts to join the beach party. We did manage to sneak through one of the resorts and walk on the beach and find the party, however, as soon as we got there everyone was packing up from the beach and going to the pool bar which would be significantly harder to sneak into without the magical "all inclusive" bracelets. After spending a short time with Jordan's family and the rest of the wedding party we returned to our resort.

At the breakfast buffet at Del Lago they had encouraged us to come back for dinner, which included a show, so we decided to give it a try. The dinner was buffet style (as everything seemed to be there) and was steak themed, though the steak was way too salty for my taste, but everything else was good. We bought a bottle of wine and settled in for the show. It was just like a circus soleil type performance with dancers, singers, cloud swingers, contortionists. We were very happy  we decided to go back for dinner and to check out the how! Normally those types of shows are like $100 a  ticket and this was just included in dinner.

Day 8, was unfortunately not too exciting to talk about. We packed up and took one last stroll around the hotel. We went back to Del Lago again for breakfast (once we found them they couldn't get rid of us!)

We took the hotels shuttle to the airport, and headed home, to the cold, cruel Massachusetts. We were a bit worried since MA was expecting a snow storm on our way home.

The flight was ok, albeit the second half of the journey I got stuck next to some very loud ditzy girls who were chewing gum loudly (my major pet peeve!) and talking all sorts of ditzy nonsense non-stop. Since this was a short flight (lay over in philly) I could barely have my ipad on for distracting noise.

We took a cab to Bruce's house after our flight since it was starting to snow and we did not have a way of getting back to Gloucester.

It was very nice to see Leo, who was well taken care of by Bruce and got to hang out with his buddy James the whole time, but nonetheless, it was a cold awakening being back home.

I hope this was adequate description of our honeymoon, and again I apologize for the delay!

Honeymoon: Day 5 Beach bums

After our first 3 days of non-stop exploring we were ready for a well deserved beach/ pool day. 

We had a very strenuous day of getting a tan, swimming, ordering drinks by the pool and eating by the water.  

We started the morning by the beach, but as aforementioned the water was not really safe to go into there since there were reefs along the beach, so we moved up to the pool area. We did some reading (I was reading the Rules of the Bone fyi.) 

The service there was amazing. They came by to inform us when happy hour was and take our orders. We tried an array of fruity drinks and coronas. We were about to leave to go get lunch when they informed us they could serve us right there! So we stayed. Life was so tough.

After a day of lounging we set off to meet up with Jordan's family who was also in Playa del Carmen for his cousins wedding. Everyone else was staying at the Riu Grand Mayan Riviera Maya, which despite almost having an identical name to the resort we were staying at, was actually about a 30 minute taxi drive across town. 

Further confusion ensued when we were dropped off at the Riu Grand Mayan Riviera Maya Mexico, which apparently is a DIFFERENT hotel a couple miles away from our intended location. All of the Riu's were all inclusive resorts so we couldn't even get to front desk to figure out were we were. We had heated conversations with security guards at the entrance of of about 4 other Riu Grand Mayan resorts before finally finding the right one! It also did not help that the restaurant within the resort we were looking for was called the "La taquilla restaurante" so when we were trying to ask for directions (in our not-so-good Spanish) we kept being pointed in the direction of liquor stores instead. 

We finally found Jordan's family, but we still had to eat separately because they would not let us into the resort since we were not staying there, even though Michael, Jordan's cousin (the groom-to-be) had us on all of the lists, had paid for us and they took copies of our passports. 

We did get to spend some time with the family for a few hours at a bar afterwards but it was a frustrating chain of events to say the least! 

Random dancing at the bar on stage with the niños

Here is my Sister-in-Law Alya and her BF Ian 

This was Michael, the Groom's, dapper rehearsal dinner attire.

Groom's Abuelo and Abuela (now somehow my great Tio and  Tia  In laws I guess!) 

One of the groomsmen chilling on the beach 

Grooms Brother, Alex, Sister Bianca and Michael 

Honeymoon: Day 3 Xplor!

Day 3 led us to another day of adventures. Throughout this time we had also spent some time at the pool, wandering around the resort and using our enormous jacuzzi in bedroom of course. 

Some statue in the resort lobby

We started the morning with a breakfast buffet at the Green Break room at the resort, which was a lovely buffet. We then hopped on another bus from the Xcaret company to check out Xplor! 

Since Xplor was largely water based, we did not bring our camera. But here are some pictures we snapped from from the bus. It was very interesting to see how variable Playa del Carmen was, it was tons of resorts and then little shacks like this: 

 

The tour guide described it as the industry in the Yucatan was currently tourism and rocks. We did also pass a few agave farms where they grow agave for tequila! The bus was going to fast at those points to take pictures though. 

 

There were A LOT of gorgeous parts of Mexico (and we obviously only saw a tiny piece of it) I just found the juxtaposition between the massive resorts and the tiny houses to be very interesting.  

Xplor was the "Adventure Theme Park" of the Yucatan.  Like I said, we did not take any pictures so these as from their website (linked) 

We started off by zip lining. I had never done it before, actually we were going to go ziplining for my bachelorette party but were unable to go because of a thunderstorm, so this was a good redemption.  There were two lines, one was higher and slower and one was faster and lower. They were both quite nice. We got to see the view of the park and some wild animals and fantastic caves. There were also a few splash landings!

Our next stop was to the underground cave swimming. There was the option to either swim or raft, we did the swimming. We also discovered that Jordan had extremely squeaky flip-flops after this adventure and I almost killed him <3 br="">

We then hung out for a bit on some hammocks to dry off (unfortunately the day we went here was the coldest day of our trip so after cave diving we needed to do some defrosting!) We also enjoyed some delicious fresh juice and smoothies! 

Next tried some amphibious vehicles.  We went zooming around the park and through caves and rivers! I am not going to lie, this was not too exciting and we were so cold at this point we were trying to focus on not getting any more wet.

Finally, we engaged in our favorite activity: the lunch buffet. We saved this for the end after all of the crazy excursions. They had a nice mix of foods but it was somewhat funny how every buffet also offered hotdogs and hamburgers (trying to appease the American kids!). 

Unfortunately our day of events left Jordan not feeling very good and I promptly took him back to the hotel and tucked him in! He blamed it on swallowing the zipline water but I think it was just the flying, and traveling since there were no GI symptoms.

Honeymoon: Day 1

This is (as usual) an extremely delayed post. It is dedicated to Jessica as I promised her back in February that I would give her the low down on my honeymoon, and I seem to have kept putting it off. I have verbally told a lot of people about it so I started to lose my zeal about talking about it! So finally not that it is April, I am getting to putting it down in words.

As a precursor, I got married in September but we decided to postpone our honeymoon.

1. We had no money after the wedding.
2. It was too hard to take off time from work for the wedding and the honeymoon at the same time/ too stressful to plan both events at once.
3. Jordan’s cousin Michael was getting married in February in Mexico and we could no afford to take two trips so we lumped them together!
4. Apparently September is hurricane season in a lot of the areas we wanted to go so it may not have been the best time.

I am very happy with our delayed honeymoon. It was especially nice to get away from the New England winter in February whereas we would not have appreciated the weather as much had we gone in September (though it was gorgeous regardless!)

Jordan and I departed Sunday morning, February 17th and flew out of Logan airport at 6:40 am, with a lay over in Houston Texas.  This was my first time in Texas! Though it was not terribly eventful as it was only an hour or so long lay over.

It was very confusing regarding to time changed because we went back to hours from Boston to Texas, and then went forward one when flying into Mexico for a total of only 1 hour behind, but by the end of the plane rides I had no idea what was going on. My ears popped a lot but overall the flight went well.

We arrived in Cancun Mexico around 2 pm local time. A fellow American at the baggage claim gave the advice to walk fast and don’t stop for anything in the entrance of the airport because everyone would try to sell you something and you would never get out! So we kept on walking, and boy was that good advice because everyone was on us like a fly on honey!

I had arranged for a shuttle from the airport to our hotel so we scrambled through tons of tourists, cabs, and shuttles in order to find the right one. There were a lot of people in blue shirts and khaki pants that we were told to look out for from the shuttle company! Our hotel was ~30 minutes away from the airport.  My father has a time share so for our wedding gift he gave us a week of his time share and he organized our hotel stay which was great. We stayed at the “Grand MayanRivieria Maya” in Playa del Carmen. The resort was great. It was huge and had a lot of character. It also boasted the second largest pool in the world. It also had a beach right on the ocean, but despite nice sand it was also all reefy and dangerous so we did not spend much time there. 

view from the beach

 

Pool Bar 

Part of the second largest pool in the world

The hotel also had some cool wild life include flamingos, crocidiles, stray cats, tons of lizards and iguanas and even a lemur! 

 

Baby Crocodile

Our room was excessively large, it was a “suite” and probably more square feet than our house. We had a kitchenette, living room, bathroom and bedroom with a Jacuzzi bathtub in the bedroom. We also had a little patio and a “spa” aka a wading pool. 

Our enormous bed

 

Our living room

Once we got set up we took a walk around the resort, took some pictures, had dinner by the pool and went to bed early after a long day of traveling.

Jordan strolling along the resort

I insisted on having a Pina Colada the first day even though I was freezing, but it was delicious.