Our Honeymoon Story

As soon as we returned from our honeymoon our friends and family expected to hear stories about how much fun we had, how gorgeous the beach was, how amazing the food was, and how we wished it had never come to an end.  They were not greeted with those stories.  Our honeymoon, was…..ummm…..not so great.  It was hard to come home and tell stories about how miserable we were, to people expecting to hear the exact opposite.  We felt like total Debbie downers, but unfortunately it was the truth.  I will start from the beginning.  We stayed at an all inclusive resort in Jamaica.  It was a five star resort that came HIGHLY recommended by our travel agent, which is precisely why we booked there.  On our shuttle ride from the airport to the hotel, our bus driver was crazy!  Not the drive a little too fast, take the turn a little too tight type, no….he was flat out crazy and we were legitimacy afraid for most of it.  At one point he came much too close to running over a pedestrian, yet came to a stop immediately before hitting him.  As our bus sat there stationary, with the pedestrian standing directly in front of it, the man pulled a gun on our bus.  Our driver, thinking nothing of it, simply drove around the man and keep on going.  And we hadn’t even made it to our hotel yet.  Upon arrival to our resort we were shown to our room, and it. was. awful.  The room was without air conditioning {in a 95 degree climate}, it was also without walls and instead had floor to ceiling screens covered by blinds.  We contacted the front desk in an attempt to get our air conditioner working, and that was when we first encountered the hotel staff in all their glory.  They were beyond rude to us, and even went so far as to yell at us.  They were unable to repair the A/C, and we requested a room change.  Five hours later, we were moved to another room.  It didn’t have walls either, but it did have air conditioning.  We remained optimistic and headed to dinner in hopes of having the worst of the trip behind us and starting fresh the next day.  We were mistaken.  The room they moved us to had bugs, a lot of them.  Bugs that covered our luggage, towels, etc.  If we put a drink down, the bugs would cover it almost immediately.  We had to spend our first night of the honeymoon in the “bug room.”  The very next day we called our travel agent and asked {begged!} her to move us to another resort.  She insisted that our only option was to move to a sister resort four hours away, yet the hotel would be nearly identical to the one we were at.  As I was on the phone with her an enormous cockroach climbed out of our wall unit and into our room, falling to the floor.  I screamed…loudly…into the phone.  I am terrified of roaches, and refused to spend one more night sharing a room with them.  We asked her to upgrade us to another room, perhaps one with walls and without bugs.  After eight more hours of the “bug” room, and staff yelling at us some more, we were moved into a third room.  The third room was much much better, not great by any means since it was still very dirty, but it had walls!  Real walls!  Each day I would lay towels down on the floor so that our feet wouldn’t have to touch the floor, and yet we still felt like we were picking up diseases.  Again, we remained optimistic and felt certain that our honeymoon would get nothing but better.  Again, we were wrong.  The food was awful!  I won’t go into too much detail here, but I will say that we got to the point where we were skipping meals because we simply could not force ourselves to eat the food there.  We ate very little throughout the entire trip and actually lost weight on our honeymoon.  We spent most of our days laying out at the beach, which was nice.  The beach was not pretty thanks to a minor hurricane that had swept through the resort two days before our arrival, but it was a beach none the less and we did our best to enjoy it.  Despite having prepaid for twelve days at this resort, we called our travel agent and asked her to simply send us home with four days left in our trip, willing to forfeit those remaining days.  She said she could arrange that for another $500.  We refused, arguing that we did not want to pay her another dime for this trip.  Our honeymoon was not at all what we imagined it would be, and we were so disappointed.

It wasn’t all bad though, and in an effort for this to not be a complete downer post, here are a few of our favorite things from the honeymoon….junk food from the gift shop {we ate chips and snickers for lunch on more than one occasion}…having walls in our third room….laying out on the beach with my favorite person in the world….drinking strawberry daiquiris to get some amount of fruit….finding internet just in time to update our fantasy football teams….the days we were able to find toast to eat for breakfast we knew it would be a good day….photo sessions on the beach….and eating real food at the airport on our way home! 

Now you know that I wasn’t going to leave Jamaica without some pictures with my babes, regardless of how the trip was going.  I planned ahead and brought not only my camera and fav lenses, but also my tri-pod and camera remote.  So I was able to set the camera up on the tri-pod, set the timer, chill on the beach with my brand new husband, and snap away with the remote control.  We would host said photo sessions just as the sun was about to set since the light was oh so pretty then.  I loved it….the hubs, not so much….but he obliged knowing how happy our photo sessions made me.  Here are a handful of the pictures that resulted from our evening photo sessions.

This next one is already on our wall at home.  : )

Getting in our daily fruit supplement.  : )

Despite the disgusting room, the inedible food, the rude staff, and the not so pretty beach, we managed to laugh at ourselves the entire trip.  There is no one else I would have wanted to spend that trip with.  He made me laugh when all I wanted to do was cry, and that is worth more to me than amazing food and a gorgeous beach.  We made it through it together, even stronger than we were before the trip, and we went home with amazing tans.