Weddingbee Blog

Like many other bees, I’m doing my honeymoon recaps before I do our wedding recaps. So, let’s get to it! To start off, Mr. FF and I had kicked around a lot of ideas pre-wedding about where to go on our honeymoon. We thought that we had settled on a California road trip style honeymoon, driving from San Fran down to Orange County, but soon realized that we would most likely be pretty tired after the wedding and didn’t want to spend our honeymoon in the car. (Side note: this was a great decision on our part, since we were dead to the world for pretty much 2-3 days after our wedding.)

So, what did we decide? The good-old honeymooner stand-by: Mexico! The idea of an all-inclusive vacation was very appealing to us, so we weighed our options decided on Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. Helping us make that decision was the very helpful Katie Frederick, whom I had found while reading Utterly Engaged magazine. (And no, she’s not paying me for the plug!) Once we had narrowed down a *final* location, Katie took our budget and our ideal length of stay and worked her travel agent magic and gave us three or four options to choose from. We finally chose the Royal in Playa Del Carmen, and in a Royal Beachfront Room.

The day after the wedding, we made a quick stop at our home, dropped off our wedding suitcases and our presents, and then headed down to Chicago, as our flight left from O’Hare early in the morning the following day. It made more sense to us (both financially, and … well, sanity-wise) to stay at a hotel close to the airport and park our car in their parking structure for the entire time we were gone. It was relatively inexpensive (around $130 total for the hotel room and parking for 9 days) and it ensured we’d have a safe place for our car, and wouldn’t be driving to the airport at 4 am the day our flight left.

We chose to stay at the Intercontinental, and I’d highly recommend it! Here are a few shots of our, um… bathroom. I thought I took some of the entire room, but no dice. Trust me, the room was just as nice/modern as the bathroom!

Design-wise, I loved this sink! Storage-wise, it was not the most convenient.

Rain shower head. ’Nuff said.

Annnnd … a picture of the toilet.
But, to be honest, I think I took this because I liked the tile and the wall color.

Ok, enough about the bathroom. Seriously. The next morning, bright and early, we left for the airport. Our flight down to Cancun was relatively hassle-free, and we spotted several other couples that we suspected were honeymooners. The only low point? Having to listen to a man two rows behind us snore (quite loudly!) the entire. flight. to. Cancun.

A few hours later, we had arrived! We arranged for private ground transportation to and from our resort, which was a great idea — we got to our resort quickly, and didn’t have to make stops at any of the other resorts on the way to ours. I highly recommend this! After we arrived, a bellman took our bags, and we completed the check-in process. When we arrived to our room,we were greeted with this:

Swans on the bed!

Marble vanity with every possible toiletry you could imagine.

Full size closet, with a separate bathroom and shower.

It was perfect, spacious, and immaculately clean! Mr. FF took no time at all taking a picture of me on our balcony which looked *directly * out onto the Caribbean Sea.

The first day, we were pretty tired. Neither of us had gotten much sleep since before the wedding, and traveling always makes it worse. We took a nap, and then headed to dinner. The resort had several a la carte resorts, and we picked Maria Marie’s for our first dinner. It was supposed to be French-Mexican fusion, but… neither of us were too impressed with our food. It was okay, but nothing super special. We did get a good picture, though!

The next day, we got up bright and early and headed to the buffet restaurant for breakfast. Our entire honeymoon, I had trouble sleeping in past 7:00 AM — blame it on my internal body clock, or maybe my excitement about being on vacation, but I couldn’t manage to sleep in! I mean, with views like this, could you stay in bed? I think not.

The next four days of our honeymoon, we spent lounging by the pool, drinking fruity drinks:

Sitting at the cigar bar … drinking fruity drinks:

And trying out many of the restaurants that our resort had to offer. We went once to Chef’s Plate, which is the only restaurant at our resort that took reservations. We had an 8-course meal, and most of it is what I would describe as “foodie food” — lots of odd sauces and foams and gels and things. It was pretty good, but since I’m a mac ‘n cheese / chocolate chip cookie girl, I might not have appreciated it to its fullest. Still, it was a great experience, and we had a lot of fun.

One of the days of our trip, we did a little shopping on 5th Avenue, Playa Del Carmen’s “shopping district”. It was a hot and sticky day, but we managed to get some great deals and good souvenirs. We also found a Ben & Jerry’s, and since I’m a self-proclaimed ice cream addict, I 1) had to get a picture in front of the store like a good little tourist and 2) got the biggest ice cream cone that I’ve ever seen in my life. It was gigantic, people. (No pictures of it, though, since I was too busy devouring it.)

See that grin? Ear to ear, all because of ice cream.

Halfway through our trip, on our way back to our room after dinner one evening, I snapped this picture of a gorgeous sunset.

Little did we know it would be the *last* gorgeous sunset of our honeymoon…

How did you decide where to go on your honeymoon? Did you go back and forth between locations a lot, or did you pick a place and stick with it?