Yeah Mon!

After a week in Jamaica, that phrase is stuck in my head!!

Dan and I stayed at the Sandals Grande Ocho Rios resort last week and had an AMAZING time. Landing in Montego Bay, you just see GREEN everywhere. I expected it to be more built up (but I've heard Kingston, the capital of Jamaica and on a totally opposite coastline, IS a lot more built up), but there is tons and tons of green. It was a two hour drive from the airport to the resort, and the shuttle bus drove us through some seriously poverty stricken areas. You see this stuff on TV, but it doesn't hit you quite the same way as seeing it in person.

We saw building after building that you'd swear was abandoned, until you'd notice there were clotheslines hanging out, and people standing inside. Many had no doors or windows, and were TINY, clustered in no apparent order, within mere feet of each other. There were wealthier pockets here and there, but overall, it was a very sad sight to see the level of poverty.

Upon arriving at the actual resort, you're suddenly in a whole different world. The building is huge and beautiful, everything is large scale (high ceilings, huge chandeliers, detailed carvings in the woodwork, etc). You are treated like royalty (you are not allowed to carry your own bags, the service was amazing, the food was great, and served up beautifully, etc).

We stayed in one of the villas on the Manor side, which had a semi-private pool (only three other couples had access to it), which worked out really great! Sometimes the main pools are just too populated and you want to be a bit more on your own, so we'd head up to our own pool. It was also nice on rainy days, because even though it was rainy, it was still WARM, and we'd have our villa as a place to keep our towels dry while we'd swim (if we used the main pool, there was no place to keep your stuff dry if it was raining).

Speaking of rain, there was a nasty storm hovering over Cuba for the entire week, and Jamaica got hit by the edge of the storm, so it RAINED. We'd been told it typically rains around 4pm everyday for an hour or two, but would clear out and be gorgeous and hot the rest of the time, but that's not quite how it went down for us. It was gray skies and windy all day Sunday, with rain off and on. It rained like crazy most of Monday, was sunny for the first half of Tuesday, and rained the second half. Was mostly gloomy for the first half of Wednesday and then POURED POURED POURED the last half of Wednesday. The big street fair and carnival the resort has planned was canceled because of how hard it was raining. Thursday was spotty sun and gray skies for the morning and then rain all afternoon, with short breaks, but gray skies. Friday FINALLY was GORGEOUS. We spent 4.5 hours in the pool soaking up as much of the sun as we could before having to leave early the next morning! So it definately rained, but the outdoor temps were still nice, so it was totally fine being outside in the gray skies! We still got to do a TON of great things; we just didn't get the SUN we'd been hoping for.

We ate great food, enjoyed some yummy drinks, participated in or watched many fun events, swam, snorkeled, sailed, climbed a waterfall, did a zipline tour through the rain forest canopy, relaxed... It was truly a wonderful experience, but I was thrilled to come home to my kids, and to "normal" food, and my own bed!!

I'll post up a slide show tomorrow, just putting some final touches on picture order, etc. I am realizing that it doesn't allow me to add much in the way of text, so I will start out tomorrow's post with some more detail about our week. It started turning into a REALLY REALLY LONG POST, so I broke the week down in tomorrow's post, along with adding the slideshow.