A Week In Paradise

Mike and I decided to go to the Sandals Grande St. Lucian in beautiful St. Lucia for our honeymoon. We left the day after the wedding, which in hindsight, we wish would have maybe given ourselves another day to relax. Both of us were really surprised with how completely exhausted we were! The one downside to St. Lucia is that it's so far from California... it takes almost two full days to get there (two full days, four airports and three planes!). We flew into Miami and spent the night there before heading to St. Lucia on Monday morning. Once we landed on the island, we had a two hour drive ahead of us:

Hanging In The Van

Our driver was really cool and told us about the history of the island and pointed out landmarks. Because we got there so late, we were absolutely starving (and hadn't had food since breakfast), so we hit up the English pub for any kind of food:

Popcorn, Wings and Drinks - Dinner Of The Champions!

On Tuesday, we basically spent the entire day doing what we ended up loving the most - standing in the ocean with drinks. The weather was absolutely beautiful and the water was seriously warm.

Hanging Out At The Beach

I also found this really cute little crab under my beach chair:

I Shall Call Him Fluffy

On day three, we did one of my most favorite things of the entire trip - we went on a horseback ride. Not any ordinary horseback ride... this one was to a little bay on the Atlantic side of the island. They then took the saddles off the horses and we got to ride/swim them into the water. It was absolutely amazing! Mike had never been on a horse before, so I was hoping this was a cool experience for him. I think it was not as exciting since he got a horse that wanted nothing to do with leaving the stables, let alone walking anywhere else.

Riding Out Of The Ocean

One of our guides was this absolutely hilarious rasta guy... who I wanted to take a picture with before we left the stables. He insisted that we pose with him - the hand signals we're doing below are the rasta symbol for unity. At least that's what he told us. For all I know, Mike and I were throwing up some sort of St. Lucian gang symbol...

Unity!

On the fourth day, we did a deep sea fishing excursion. I've never really been out in the ocean like that, so I was worried that I would get sea sick. Fortunately, I did really well... no issues! The way they had the system set up is that there are five poles off the back of the boat. Each person gets ten minutes in the chair - if a fish bites on any of the poles while you're in the chair, you get to reel it in.

Mike Taking His Turn In The Chair

Unfortunately, we didn't catch anything. We heard on the radio that none of the other boats were catching either, but these guys tried really hard to find us some - we did all sorts of loops through kelp beds and other areas they normally have fish in.

That night we had our candlelit dinner on the beach. It was really nice - they set up a table right by the surf with two tiki torches lighting the table. We had a four course meal and it was absolutely delicious!

Dinner On The Beach

On our last day, we took a hike up to the top of this little hill next to our hotel. At the very top of the hill was a fort that was built by the British when they occupied St. Lucia. From the fort you could see where the Carribean and Atlantic oceans came together. It was stunning!

Two Oceans

The weather was beautiful for the entire time we were there... it was mostly in the 80s during the day although it was super humid. Several times during the afternoons it would just rain out of nowhere, but it was a warm rain and only lasted a few minutes. On our last night, there was a beautiful thunderstorm off the coast - we took our drinks to the beach and laid on the chairs to watch the lightning.

Then, it was time for the long trip back home... over way faster than we thought it would be! I think that if we had not been exhausted, we probably would have been a little bored at Sandals, but this was perfect for our honeymoon. We were completely pampered, didn't need to worry about where we were going to get food and had all the drinks we could handle! It was the perfect honeymoon!