We’re married! It was super exciting and expensive, and I may, at some point, write a post about it! But this post isn’t about our wedding, which is something I’ve talked about essentially non-stop for the last year and a half (though you can read about the tech powering it here). No, this post is about our honeymoon! Unlike a lot of our friends, we decided to take our honeymoon immediately after the wedding. Katie and I travel a fair bit (certainly more than I did before I started dating her), and if we’d delayed the trip, we thought it would just feel like a regular vacation. So three days after our wedding, we set off for the island of St. Lucia, a place I’d only learned existed on the day we actually booked our honeymoon.
Yes, St. Lucia, an island in the Caribbean. I’ll freely admit that it wasn’t even the first honeymoon we’d planned! When Katie and I first started planning the trip, we thought we’d go on some kind of exotic adventure. First, Europe! We’d fly into some European capital, rent a car, and make our way from country to country. This sounded great, except that 1) Katie doesn’t enjoy driving and 2) I get generally uncomfortable going places where I don’t speak the language. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but we were pretty burned out from all the wedding stuff, and wanted to relax. So I suggested taking a month and traveling the West Coast of the United States. We’d both never really been to most of it! But, in order to see all the things we wanted to see, we’d have to take like a month off, and neither of us really wanted to use all of the vacation we had saved for the rest of the year. So that was out.
After a final hurrah attempt at planning a trip to the Amalfi Coast in Italy, we settled on island. Specifically, Caribbean island. We both really, really loved our trip to Aruba a couple of years back, and the idea of doing a vacation like that again was extremely attractive. But, Katie didn’t want to do Aruba (which I’ll readily admit, I was super bummed about. So, I set off to figure out another place for us to go. In between absolutely destroying myself with Work work to hit some absurd deadlines, I managed to search the internet for info on other Caribbean islands. Jamaica? Honestly that was the only other one I really knew aside from Aruba.
I remembered that Katie had told me about a trip she and few of her friends had taken to an all-inclusive resort a few years back, and she loved it, so I decided to check them out. At first I balked, because they are expensive. The nightly rate at an all-inclusive was roughly double the non-inclusive rate at a nice hotel. So if you’re looking at a $250 room, normally, you were looking at $500 and up for the all-inclusive rate. Now, admittedly, you’re getting a lot! “Free” drinks, food, etc. However, reading the reviews on my favorite travel website, it became increasingly clear that the quality varied widely between resorts, and between islands. I started to despair, until I came across the Sandals Grande St. Lucian. I’d seen commercials for Sandals resorts, and always sort of thought they were stupid. This seemed pretty good though!
After conferring with Katie about St. Lucia (“seems fine”), I did some more in-depth research. Apparently, much like Aruba, St. Lucia is fairly south in the Caribbean, and rarely gets destroyed by hurricanes. So that was a plus. A huge minus was it is goddamn expensive. We were looking at a week’s vacation, and for the nice room that I wanted it was way more than any vacation I’d taken, ever. Including 2 weeks in Europe. But, having struck out so many times on other trips, I decided screw it. St. Lucia it was! So for the price of more than 2 of the Jeep that I had just bought, I booked the airfare and stay. In the next couple of posts I’ll write about our stay, and post some pictures I took, too.
-Chris