Wedding Blog

Part I

Ports of Calls:

Labadee, Haiti - a private island owned by Royal Caribbean.

Ochos Rios, Jamaica

We drove through a rain forest & explored Shaw Park - filled with lots of exotic flowers and spice trees.

A nutmeg tree! The nutmeg is inside the fruit.

We stopped in a town called Hell. Sorry, we didn’t have time to send a postcard.

These rock formations look like they could be from hell right?

We also climbed Dunn’s Water Fall! We brought our digital camera with us not realizing that we’d have nowhere to put it. I did bring along a ziplock bag just in case we needed to carry it with us in the water. Well, we did that and unfortunately the ziplock bag tore open during our climb and the camera got wet. I was devastated! We have no pictures on this day. (When we got back on board the ship, we bought another camera. It cost us a bit of money, but it was worth it.)

A view from the base of the falls facing the ocean..

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We started at this point. It was much more treacherous than we anticipated. We were forced to hold hands on both sides of us, so I held on to Mr. Violet and some random stranger. I was highly uncomfortable at first holding a stranger’s hand, but I held on to the stranger for dear life because some parts of the climb were scary. Even though I wore rubber shoes made specifically for these water sports, there were a few times I thought I was going to fall. It was also pretty high up. This picture does not really show how high it gets but it was quite a hike! It was amazing though.

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Up and up we go..

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Grand Cayman Islands

Mr. Violet said that this was his favorite island out of the 4 that we visited.

We hung out with sea turtles. There were little ones and big ones. We were only able to pick up the smaller ones because even the smaller turtles were quite heavy!

…And we swam with the stingrays! Okay, we didn’t really swim (in fact I can’t swim) but we did take a 45 minute boat ride into the middle of the ocean to the Sand Bar and stood in about 4 feet of water. Stingrays surround the area when people are there because they smell the food (not us, but of the squid!) It’s crazy to think that the ocean can have such shallow water in the middle of nowhere. It was quite amazing having stingrays just swim around us. People were screaming because the stingrays were so big, but they were very friendly. I was not afraid of them, but moreso of the waves. I can’t swim and even though I’ve been in the ocean a few times by now, I still get frightened. This experience was really cool and we’re so glad we did it!

Cozumel & Playa Del Carmen in Mexico

We decided to skip the beach and snorkeling excursions even though we heard that snorkeling is phenomenal here. We figured that nothing would beat our Great Barrier Reef experience in Australia. Instead, we spent a whole day in Tulum to see the Mayan Ruins. It was everything we had hoped for and more. We met a Native Mayan who gave us an in depth history of the Mayans (smart Indians) and then walked around on our own just taking in everything we saw.

Just about to enter the Mayan Ruins

Plenty of iguanas roaming about

It’s really a humbling experience. It’s unbelievable what the Mayans were able to create with their bare hands so long ago. Among the many wonderful things that the Mayans created were salt & honey (sugar used to make chocolate).

The Ruins overlook the Caribbean waters. The view is amazing!

My first coconut water!

A beer before we head back, why not!?

We’re really glad we decided to have a honeymoon cruise. It was fun and relaxing and we saw 4 islands in one week without needing to travel with our luggage. We really loved our experience on the Freedom of the Seas. The staff were super friendly and really tried to accommodate all our needs. I think we see a 4th voyage in the near future!