There's noting like the slap to reality after vacation

All week long we have been enjoying beautiful, warm weather. Only one of the days was really rainy (but still very nice). The temerature never really moved more than five degrees warmer or cooler than 85. The water was perfectly clear and somewhere in the 65-70 degrees range. And so the welcome back to New York weather was that much more of a shock to the system. We get back and it's in the 40's and drizzling. Now it's raining and just blech... But of course, I'm easing back into the normal swing of things. Aaron had to work last night. Poor thing.

So here's a litte rundown of my honeymoon (the clean version) and some of the things I learned.

Flying out of JFK sucked. We were delayed but luckily allowed for a lot of that nonsense.

When arriving in Puerto Rico look for the girls in bright orange t-shirts, they will hail cabs for you.

Also, get your calls and text messages out now, you won't have much reception to speak of in the Caribbean.

Got to the very pretty Serenade of the Seas. dropped our bags off with every intention of going back into San Juan for dinner. We never made it back out. Get your head out of the gutter. I meant that it was raining buckets. It's the end of the rainy season in Puerto Rico so they get daily evening rain. We then enjoyed our stateroom balcony.

When traveling on a cruise, I highly recommend getting a room with a blacony. I used to go with interior rooms to save on the cost, but you can scratch that; the cost is worth it.

St. Thomas in the morning was a bit of a shock. I'm not used to arriving at working docks. The docks I've been used to are the pretty ones, set up specifically for the cruise liners. Once you get past that, the place is very pretty and is the second best place for shopping and haggling. Aaron got me a really pretty necklace. I got him a very nice Movado watch. :)

St. Martin. The best place for shopping in the Caribbean. I wish I had known that the day before, but it's all good we got great deals anyway. One of the THE coolest things on Main Street in St. Maarten is The Yoda Guy store. There is a store run by the creator and designer of Yoda and his wife. This is the coolest store ever. The guy is now retired so he sells his paintings and sketches. You can even buy original storyboard sketches and script pages, if you're up to shelling out a few hundred, but the stuff there is so cool. We picked up a few thigns and had a very nice chat with his wife. He wasn't there since he had a dental emergency. We looked through the museum and took photos. (I will put these up as soon as I can.)

Antigua. Hmmm... we were going to do things there but the place was not so impressive. Luckily we found an nice corner and had lunch. If given the choice, skip Antigua. You won't be missing much. The best part of Antigua was the spa treatment we got ourselves on the ship.

St. Lucia. Oh, did I ever love this place. We went out from the captial city of Castries down to the Piton mountains and the volcano in Sufreiere. After that we hit the Diamond Botanical Garden. I can't even discribe it. The place is absolutely beautiful. But you pass osme of the biggest examples of disparity among the rich and poor you will ever see. In one of the fishing villages we passed, we saw these beautiful homes overlooking the bay and then along the water, there were essentially shanties, barely holding together. The people though, were extremely sweet. We got to see a local fisherman breaking down a swordfish he had litterally just caught and pulled off his boat.

The volcano I was talking about has vents all over the island. So every now and then you'll see steaming vents. The caldara itself if the twon of Sufriere. The western wall of the thing blew away, so you can actually drive into it. The lava flow is about a mile below the surface. When you do get is bubbling mud and water springs. Very cool to look at. It just smells like sulfer. They also have some pretty cool mineral springs. Unfortunately we didn't get to go into them. We need to go back.

The botanical garden was beautiful. It is in the middle of a rainforrest and in the center there is a really cool waterfall. I highly recommend it. At the end of the tour we had lunch at a mountain-top restaurant, overlooking Sufriere, the fishing village and its bay, the Pitons and the volcanic springs in the distance. Awesome!

Barbados was also incredibly beautiful. The people there are sweet as can be. We took a snorkeling tour- swim with turtles and shipwreck exploration. I actually ended up standing on a turtle. I didn't notice I was right next to the guy with the bag of food until I felt something coming up under my feet. When I looked into the water this huge turtle was directly under my feet, kind of pushing me out of the way with his shell. He turned looked at me and then went on his merry way to get to the food guy. So cute. The last stop of the tour was at one of the most perfect beaches ever. It is called Brown's Beach in Carslile Bay- teehee. I wondered if there was an Esmee Bay. We went back to it after the tour took us back to the ship. We have pictures! I layed out in the water, floating for what seemed like hours without really drifting away. There are barely any waves which also means that if you're still enough, little fish will come up to you to check you out. :)

Oh yes, going back to Twilight... the Cullens have taken over! From JFK to the ship (mostly on the ship), I saw at least a dozen different people reading one of the books in the series. I brought Breaking Dawn with me (I thought it was appropriate). On our last day, I spent time at the pool and ended up sitting next to a family that we had run into a few times during the trip. When I got my book out to read, the teeneaged daughter gasped and beamed at me when she asked which book in the series I was reading. I'm not kidding, the girl was actually beaming like I was one of the Jonas Brothers. She then pulled out New Moon. She was about half way through it. When they started the cruise, her mom was on New Moon, the girl started Twilight. She bruned through that and started NM as soon as her mom finished. At this point the father was about half way through Twilight. The mom looked bummed she was reading Wicked. She said she didn't think she would get through NM so quickly or she would have gotten Eclipse before they left. So there we sat, three people in a row, reading a book in the Twilight series. But it gets better. Later on, when I went to find a new seat in the sun, I noticed two women in the row behind us reading books in the series as well! Teehee. Yay Twihards!

Oh and the last lesson, avoid cruising at the end of the rainy/ hurricane season or bring Dramemine (sp?)! This was the rockiest cruise I have even been on (I've been on other and didn't feel a thing). We sailed around a few rain storms and wow! Aaron is gets motion sickness pretty badly and the stuff saved his vacation. Heck, even I had to take one on the fist night.

So that's about it. :) Now back to unpacking and getting back to real life... Booo....