Jamaica Me Crazy!!!

Hey party people! I'm back from Jamaica (sad face), but at least I return with a tan and some really awesome memories!
I want to send out a big thanks to all of the lovely ladies who guest posted for me while I was away! Your posts were great, and I'm glad to see that everyone else enjoyed them, too! You girls rock!! :)

Now, let's hop into a recap, shall we?

MG and I had the easiest travel situation down to Jamaica, but when we arrived the sky was filled with grey clouds which eventually went away as the late afternoon went on.

When we first got to the hotel/resort, I won't lie, we were a bit disappointed. It wasn't like the place we stayed in the DR and the clientele at this place seemed kind of trashy. Luckily this got better as the week went on. We did get an ocean front room, which also made things feel a bit better. This was our view every morning and evening:

After the first night, things started to look up (as things do when you are sitting ocean-side, soaking up the sun, playing in the water, and drinking yummy tropical drinks) and we stayed away from the riff-raff by staying at the "Adult Only" beach with it's own private bar and pool. And we partook in the amazeballs jerk chicken hut that the resort had. This stuff was GOOD....my mouth is still watering thinking about it:

The view wasn't too bad from the Jerk Hut either :)

Despite being smart (or attempting to be) and applying sunscreen repeatedly throughout the day, I somehow ended up with a wicked sunburn on my legs. Like, the worst sunburn I've ever had in my life. It was as if my sunscreen (the spray kind) decided to work in some areas and not in others, despite being applied everywhere. I tried my best to be smart about the sunscreen and got burned....literally. This made for an interesting night, and I spent some quality time with aloe.

Luckily that night we had a delish dinner at the Italian restaurant on the resort which was yummy, and when dinner was over, a group called the SilverBirds was doing a steel drum band performance. They were SO good, you guys, and were the best performers we saw while there. They played all kinds of songs, old ones and current ones. It was awesome!

The next day (Wed) we spent some time on the beach again (me in the shade, nursing/hiding my burns), and decided that we wanted to go ziplining. We heard from some other people there of two places to do it: one was more tame and had places to stop in the middle to enjoy coconut juice, etc. The other was more intense, higher up, and involved repelling at one point. The easy one sounded good to me, and the intense one lit MG's eyes up. So, we decided to do the intense one (as I silently tried not to pee myself thinking about it).

Later that night we went to the pier/dock to enjoy the sunset from right over the water, and it was magnificent. Luckily where our room was, we were also able to enjoy it every night from our balcony, as well.

We met a nice couple on the pier from New Hampshire who we met up with later that night for some drinks and chatting after dinner at the seafood restaurant which was SO good!

Thursday and Friday were more beach days, with dinner on Thursday at the Jamaican restaurant (also good) and Friday being our last day on the beach. We went down in the morning for a little over an hour since we were supposed to get picked up for ziplining (aka peeing my pants) at 10:45. Apparently someone messed things up when we signed up for the tour because around 11:15 no one had come. We got rescheduled for 1:30 that afternoon so we went back out to the beach for a bit, grabbed some food and then went off to ziplining.

I won't lie. I was nervous. And excited. MG was gung-ho and laughing at my nervousness. We rode up with another couple from Alabama who were super nice and soon arrived after a bumpy ride, to sign our waivers and get our gear. About 15 people piled into another truck that took another crazy bumpy ride up to where we would be zipping from.

Right before the first platform, we took a picture....I was still nervous but since we were towards the end of the group, it helped to see others go...and not die :)

It was SO much fun. We zipped across the trees, starting from 12,000 ft above sea level. We went zipping on about 3-4 lines with incredible views of the forest area all the way out to the beach and the ocean...and then I saw what freaked me out. Before my 4th rope, I see across the way a platform that has nothing around it....no trees, nothing, and it is ONLY held up my ropes. THIS is where we "repelled"....I put that in quotes because it wasn't your typical let yourself down slowly. It was a free-fall. An 87 foot freefall.

That's ME!

I started getting really scared as soon as I got onto the platform and had nothing to hold onto. So I welcomed myself to hold onto the older gentleman's shoulder in front of me who luckily didn't mind. MG zipped across to the platform after me and held onto me as well. My legs were legit shaking like crazy. Oh, and did I mention that you could see THROUGH the bottom of the platform? So I got to see exactly how far I would be dropping. Yay. It was my turn and they tell you to keep arms up and legs out. Well, as soon as they dropped me, I went into survival mode and tucked everything in, which prompted them to stop me halfway down. I got a nice view and when they released me again I screamed like a little girl. I didn't realize that the entire group that had been ahead of us was standing there waiting and watching....so when I landed I said "Well, I guess I just gave you guys an entertaining show" to which they all laughed. After that there was some more zipping and then one more freefall drop which was much less scary. The whole thing was absolutely incredible, even with the scary part. I was pretty dang proud of myself afterwards, too :) Luckily our guides were great, especially one guy, Henry, who dealt with me when I was having my panic:

After we were done, we came back to the main building where we signed our lives away and had a couple of drinks, and took in the beautiful scenery!

Even tho it was cloudy, it was still gorgeous!

That night we enjoyed another delish meal with some more jerk chicken, and turned in early since we were both wiped out from our earlier adventures of the day.

Saturday was what MG and I call "Travel Purgatory" since we spent about 13 hours traveling to get back home. 

I couldn't have asked for a better trip. Even though it started off with a little bit of a downer, things turned around and we had an amazing time!

Things I learned this trip:

--when you travel with someone you love, you can have fun anywhere

--doing something you wouldn't normally do, can be insanely fun

--sunsets near the equator are to die for!

--any song sounds better when it's played on steel drums :)

That's my recap! Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as we enjoyed partaking in it :)