Honeymoon: Day 6, Michael and Amanda's wedding!

Day 6 of our honeymoon was Michael and Amanda's BIG day! 

Let me start off a bit with Michael and Amanda...

Michael is Jordan's cousin (or 2nd cousin.) Their Abuelita's (grandmothers) are sisters. 

Michael grew up in Miami, Florida whereas Jordan grew up around Boston, Massachusetts, yet they remained very close.

Michael’s little sister, Bianca danced with Amanda’s little sister, Melissa. They were BFFs and they always wanted to be sisters, so they came up with a scheme to get their older brother and sister together so they could be sisters. One day when they were hanging out at Bianca’s house, Melissa had Amanda pick her up and hence introducing the two… and so it began! That was 10 years ago.

A couple years ago, Jordan and I went on a trip to Florida for a vacation and to spend sometime with his family, this was my first time meeting them. We stayed with Michael and Amanda and their two dogs. They were so inviting and fabulous! All of Jordan’s family members down in Miami were like instant friends and family, they all welcome you with a hug and a kiss and invite you a long for everything.

I was, and still am, somewhat jealous and completely inspired by Amanda. She is gorgeous, super positive, and when I first met her she had just started working as a personal trainer. The jealously part comes in where she was out of the blue asked to become a trainer, whereas I up in Boston was certified and couldn’t find a job to save my life! Overall, her attitude is just amazing. Where other people would complain and whine she counts her blessings, which is always something I strive to do, but often come up short.

Amanda being an amazing yogi

After Jordan and I got engaged, Michael was like "now the pressure is really on!" since his cousin of the same age was getting married the family started giving him more pressure (But um, really... after 10 years I think the pressure was really already there.) 

Amanda's mother, who passed away 2 years ago, was Mexican, so they decided to have their wedding in Mexico in Playa del Carmen. 

The wedding was beautiful, and the location was amazing, but I will say the planning and communication left a bit to be desired. Especially since I was like the crazy wedding scheduler with everything for about 3 days surrounding the wedding broken down into roughly 15 minute intervals, so being there and having NO IDEA what was going on was a bit nerve racking. For instance, the meeting place described on Day 5 had not been decided until day 4 of our Mexico trip so I could not really plan or prepare.

Parents of the groom and my in-laws pre-wedding

Jordan was a groomsman in the wedding, and even he had no idea what time the actual wedding was at. We were told that a shuttle bus was leaving their hotel at 4:30 and another at 5:00 pm. We both managed to get on the 4:30 shuttle, which was good, because the 5:00 one never came and people had to find taxis and did not entirely know where they were going. 

The wedding took place at Xcaret, the ceremony was at St Francis of Assisi chapel, which was an open chapel without walls on top of a hill at Xcaret, which had a gorgeous view of the park. Getting there was a bit of a challenge, especially for older relatives and girls in high heals as it was a rocky, steep journey up to the chapel. 

The ceremony was beautiful, they did the traditional Mexican lasso ceremony where both Amanda and Michael's grandmothers roped a lasso around them to signify thier coming together as one. The lasso had been threaded with flowers from Amanda's mothers wedding dress which was a very special touch. Michael and Amanda had written their own vows, which was terrible in the sense that I cried the whole time. I always find the personal vows to be so beautiful and heart wrenching. They were a combination of sentimental, loving and funny. 

Lasso Ceremony

For the wedding reception, we walked across the park to "La Isla" Restaurant. Along the route were men dressed in traditional Mayan attire with face paint and blowing through conch shells as may have occured during Mayan celebrations. 

La Isla restaurant is set in a natural cave that involves walking down a spiral path down into the cave, which is surrounded by waterfalls and has an impressive fire in the middle. We were greeted by ornately garbed waiters who provided guests with cucumber or mango margaritas with a chili pepper rim (which was unexpected but delicious!). 

The whole restaurant set up was surreal. They had a harp player suspended over the cave, the roof was an intricate thatched spiral roof, lights were reflected off of the water and the caves crevices. 

Speeches were given by the father of the bride, best man (Michael's older brother Alex), maid of honor (Amanda's little sister Melissa) and a few other friends. Most of the speeches were in Spanish so I understood about a quarter of them. Amanda's sisters was given in English, in which she described how she and Bianca had wanted to be sisters, and about how their mother couldn't be there, it was a very touching speech which clearly lead to water works. 

Alex, the best man, toasting his brother

Melissa, the Maid of Honor, promising that she would not make today all about her, as she likes to do

Amanda laughing at a speech 

First Dance as newly weds! 

The reception went on with much dancing and tequila!   The food was also gorgeous and delicious of course, including an entree of surf and turf and some crazy looking desserts 

Honeymoon: Day 4 Xcaret!

Day 4 of our honeymoon journey, we did our last of the three Xcaret Tours, this time to Xcaret! 

Since Jordan had not been feeling well I was afraid we were going to have to skip our last tour, but I loaded him up with drugs (tylenol) and we shipped off on another bus!

Xcaret is a giant park that has cultural displays, nature exhibits, animal sanctuaries and beaches. There was a lot to take in!

We watched some of the cultural displays including the flying men (Jordan got a cool video of this but I do not know how to upload it.) The men basically come down from ropes by their feet and spin around while one man stays on top and sings and plays a drum. It is a way of honoring the gods.

We walked around and checked out the animal exhibits like the flamingos, jaguars, and manatees

 

Of course I could not miss an opportunity to make Jordan dress up as a turtle since I always call him a snapping turtle! (He snaps his jaw all the time.)

It was REALLY hot so we again did some water activities including some snorkling. We had to lock up the camera for this part so no photos. We also checked out the cemetery, stain glass windows, and butterfly pavilion. 

 

As you may know, I am kind of bird obsessed, so of course I dragged Jordan around the aviary. There were all sorts of parrots, flamingos, and water birds. 

 I was a bit disappointed since all of the pictures in the advertisements had parrots sitting on people, yet none of them seemed to want to be my friend. 

At the very end of the day we discovered my FAVORITE part of the park - the gift shop! Inside the gift shop were these bird eggs in an incubator that were hatching as you watched. It was amazing! All of a sudden you would be watching and ::CRACK:: a baby chick would go flying out and run around on top of the other eggs. I think I was literally crying I was so excited. Jordan joked that it was a good thing we did not see them earlier or I wouldn't have wanted to go see anything else.

We had the option to stay for a cultural show with dancing and music, but neither of us were feeling too good by this point so we decided to take the early bus home after having a traditional Mexican dinner.

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.