Aruba - Day 2

On our first full day here, we decided to just enjoy the ocean. Our hotel is right on the water, and we even have chair tags to hold our chairs while we enjoy the ocean! 

 We had some fun taking photos from under the water...

 It's hard to tell from the photo, but these birds were really big!

The underwater camera still had some water on the lens, so some of our pictures are distorted:

 Relaxing on the beach

 We collected some seashells and dead coral, it's all over our beach, so we're going to cover a picture frame with some of the ones we collected.

 These iguanas are all over the island and they come very close to us.

 We took a break and had lunch.

 And the iguana followed us :)

 We walked down the beach towards some of the other hotels and there were hardly any people in the water down there!

 Then it was time to go on our snorkeling cruise! There were only 20 people on the boat! It was a sailboat, so there was no noisy motor to talk over and they served us drinks the whole time.

 We had lots of fun watching the kitesurfers! It looks so hard!

 We got to an area called Broken Rock and started snorkeling for about 45 minutes.

 Typical underwater photos. (I forgot to turn on the underwater setting, so everything is unnaturally blue)

 A very colorful fish that we followed for a while.

 A sea urchin - they move their spikes quite a bit!

 The only photo we got of both of us on the boat before the camera battery died.

 A photo of one of the schools of fish in Catalina Cove with some coral.

After the battery died, we saw one of the type of fish that skim along the bottom and camouflage themselves with the coral that they rest on. Both of their eyes are on the top of their body and they swim flat with the bottom. We also were about 4 feet from a pair of angel fish that found the side of the boat very tasty.
It was amazing to see these large schools of fish swimming around us and how they would all respond at the same time in the same direction! When we got back on the boat, they served us some very tasty tomato and cheese sandwiches and grilled cheese (simple, but very tasty after all of that snorkeling).

Back at the hotel they had local artists displaying their artwork and souvenirs. We didn't buy any, but we have plenty of ideas, and they'll all be back next week.

Today's schedule - hanging out and chilling!

Aruba - Day 1

Hi everyone!

Thank you to everyone who made the wedding extra-special! We had last-minute help from so many people, it was truly overwhelming that so many people who mean so much to all of us were there to support us as we start our lives together.

I am currently sitting in our fabulous hotel room in Aruba (on Palm Beach) and Travis is sleeping, so I thought I would share some of our highlights and experiences so far - so that we don't forget. I'm not going to edit this so excuse any typos.

We stayed in a beautiful hotel Sunday night which reminded both of us of Europe - the door to each room looked out on a little garden with a fountain and the cafe where we ate breakfast on Monday. It was very romantic and a surprise for me (because Travis wouldn't tell me ahead of time where we were going!)

We got up relatively early on Monday, despite the fact that we were both rather tired, because we needed to catch our plane! So we went downstairs to have a HUGE breakfast first! They had homemade oatmeal and omlettes made-to-order and coffee. But they insisted that we had to wear shoes, which was sad because I only had my high heels from the wedding day (and my feet were really sore!). But my wonderful husband (I love saying that!!) volunteered to run back up to the room for me and retrieve them!

As we ate breakfast we kept overhearing on the news that there was a really bad storm going through Chicago, and we could hear the thunder through the roof of the hotel. So we decided to hurry up and get going to make sure we didn't miss our flight! But we threw our lucky penny into the fountain (which we found heads-up while we were taking pictures).

After taking several detours due to knocked over powerlines and trees from what turned out to be a "wall of wind" during the storm (which had only lasted about an hour), we finally got to the airport. Our plane was only delayed about 15 minutes!!

While on our second flight, we watched the sunset and saw a lightning storm.

When we finally got to our resort, we were exhausted, but we were excited to see our room had a full kitchen, a huge bathtub and even a little patio, which we can see the ocean from!

We took a little walk on the beach to the only restaurant nearby still serving food after 11pm at night - a sushi bar!

Which sadly, had no sushi left, but they had what tasted like the best turkey sandwich we've ever had (or we were just really hungry). They also had these giant hanging sculptures on the ceiling, which we tried to take pictures of, but they were all blurry.

Next up: First snorkeling trip!