honeymoon part one

there have been a lot of things i've wanted to blog about over the past few weeks, but i am paranoid that the people i would be blogging about would somehow stumble across this and make things messier than they already are.  so i'm going to refrain from it until i can think of some way to make the issues more vague.

there are also several personal struggles that i am going though right now, but i'm not sure how to blog about them appropriately.  i'm sure they'll come out in time.

so in the interest of avoiding another 12 month span between blog posts, i will tell you the story of how i thought i ruined our honeymoon.

when we started planning the honeymoon, i had a very specific idea in my head of what i wanted it to be, as i'm sure most brides do.  i knew i wanted to go somewhere exotic and unusual.  no hawaii or mexico for me -um.. WAY too common.  this is what i wanted:
 

 so i started researching the greek isles (and telling everyone that's where we were planning to go) and i bargained with myself that if we stayed in a more budget hotel and not the $500 per night private villas it wouldn't really matter because HELLO! we were in the GREEK ISLES!  then that stupid volcano in iceland erupted and we decided that maybe going near europe wasn't such a good idea.

so my next choice was something like this:

 
it turns out that a private tahitian hut in the ocean with a glass bottomed hot tub is so far out of our price range that it would have cost more than our actual wedding.  so that idea was scratched.

then i thought that perhaps something in the caribbean would be better suited to our price range and schedule.  it was too overwhelming to pick the best island to visit, so i called a travel agent who specialized in honeymoons.  i told her that we wanted to go to the caribbean but under no circumstances did i want to stay in a cheesy sandals resort in jamaica. that's when she suggested barbados.

i started looking at hotels in barbados and found some amazing hotels (including the one where tiger woods was married).  i picked out 3 hotels that seemed pretty luxurious, but not too outrageous, and sat down with j to make a decision.  j pointed out that since we were on a very fixed budget, we could afford these hotels, but we couldn't afford much else besides food.. and wouldn't we want to do a bunch of activities while we were there?   we hopped onto expedia to see what the price range of hotels was in barbados and HOLY CRAP HERE'S ONE THAT IS $2000 CHEAPER THAN WHAT WE PICKED OUT!!!!!!

i didn't book it right away, because i am very anal prudent about getting past the marketing bull and finding out what a place is really like, so i had to spend 2 days googling and reading all 500 reviews on every single travel review website that i could find. overall,  the coconut court beach hotel got very favorable reviews from fellow travelers.  the gist of the reviews were that yes, the hotel was old and a little outdated (no 1000 thread count sheets here!), but the staff was superb, the location was outstanding, and the beach was the most perfect spot of beach on the whole island.

we decided to book.  because REALLY, how much time will we *actually* spend in the room, even thought it *is* our honeymoon?  the beach and location are WAY more important, right? and $2000 is a lot of island tours and yummy meals and alcohol and snorkeling trips and shopping, right??

we are practical people.

so we booked the resort, sent in the deposit, and looked forward to our first major vacation together and jared's first time out of the country.

to be continued...