Our Honeymoon: 2010

All you married ladies out there probably know how magical it is to be a honeymooner, I don’t care where you went or for how long… it’s just magical. The feeling of being a newly wed is unforgettable. I often crave my honeymoon with insane intensity. For Matt and I, our honeymoon was *almost exactly as we hoped it to be.

Not long ago I shared our 2nd anniversary date-night—it went as perfect as it could have. Our honeymoon however had a few more quarks to it.

I loved our honeymoon, I hope I get that across… but we also look forward to re-doing our honeymoon again some day, if you care to stick around, I'll recap our somewhat humorous week of love:

It started off perfect, our flight was amazing, a short three hour direct flight to Cancun, Mexico.  Once there, customs was a breeze and we were on our way to our resort via a wonderful bus/taxi service. (We were staying at an all-inclusive resort in Riviera Maya.) When we got dropped off at our resort we looked around with amazement, it looked just like it did online, maybe only grander and more impressive. Because of how efficient our trip from Cleveland, OH to Cancun was we arrived at our resort around 1:00pm. We were originally told that there should be no problem getting in to our room upon arrival.

Matt checked in, they gave us our all-inclusive wristbands, told us our room would be ready shortly, and to feel free to go eat and check the facility out. Matt and I did just that. Thinking we surly took enough time for our room to be ready, we headed back to the front desk…

About five hours later and about five trips to the front desk we were finally given keys to our room. (We had a nice long wait in the lobby of the resort, I think I drifted off to sleep, but after hour two of hanging out, I just wanted a room to freshen up and change in.) And when the time finally came to get to our room, I could not wait to see where we would be staying for the first week as a married couple.

(Now I had been anticipating our resort room so much. We booked almost a year in advance. I was dreaming of our balcony over looking the ocean, the amazing rooms I had seen in pictures, and based off the referral of my brother and his wife who had been to this exact resort three times… I knew it was going to be a great room.)

Immediately upon getting the key card we noticed we were on the first floor, I was so bummed. Then I realized a floor level room could be nice… walking right out to the ocean.  However once we got to the room and opened the drapes--we looked right at a wall of 10ft shrubs. I couldn’t see a thing.(Again, I could get past this, just bummed.)

We also immediately notice two full sized beds. Two full sized beds in a honeymoon package? Maybe they do things differently in Mexico. Hm. 

Matt decided he would travel back to the front desk to see if we could be moved to a higher up room and one with a king sized bed. He came back disappointed and probably scared to break the news to me that this was not going to be possible. The resort was at 'full capacity' and there was not much they could do for us. However… they offered to ‘connect’ our two full sized beds for us. Housekeeping came and connected the two beds with a ‘connector’ thingy. The new arrangement made the length of the bed look like a football field. Not exactly what we were hoping for and because there was still a crack where the beds met we essentially still slept in separate beds. Comical.

As the week went on things got funnier and funnier. In probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my life we had an encounter with the room service guy, a door that did not have a ‘do not disturb’ sign on it… and two naked honeymooners… do you see where I’m going with this? (I can't believe I just shared this with the blogging world. But too good not to share, don't ya think?)

During our first day we also found out we had a broken outdoor patio hot tub that took half the week to get fixed. The best was watching the Spanish speaking repair man try to explain to Matt (who is not a Spanish speaking man) what was wrong with the hot tub. Only to find out that he actually did not fix the hot tub on his first visit and would need to be called back yet again.

This is Matt in the empty hot tub and then trying to fix the hot tub. That was all the more water we could get in the tub. ha.

On one occasion when returning to our room there were three Mexican men standing on ladders with their heads in the ceiling of our room. Through our rough knowledge of Spanish we discovered they were fixing our 'broken' air conditioning unit. A unit that we did not even know was broken (seemed plenty cool to me), nor did we ever get notice they were coming by to fix it. It took them the entire afternoon of a day to fix the air, leaving us kicked out of our room most of the day.

On another trip back to our room, our key cards didn’t work. We couldn’t get in our room. Talk about confused. We figured we must not know our room number? After we were very sure we were at the right room Matt went to the front desk and got us new working cards…

Midweek a nice tropical rainstorm came through, it kind of seemed like the typical afternoon beach storm. However with this storm the resort lost electricity. At this point Matt and I just looked at each other and laughed.  

Don’t get me wrong, through this all... we were laughing… 'enjoying the all you can eat and drink' and soaking up the sun.

Here is the proof of the sun soaking, or the sun screen mishap? (To my defense, he told me to only put it on his shoulders--I listened, this happened.)

But now some pictures of us absolutely loving our honeymoon:

But it didn’t end there.

Matt got us kicked out of a restaurant for not having nice enough shoes on. We ended up having to go to the gift shop where he could buy water shoes. Yes, I said water shoes. The restaurant suggested the water shoes and confirmed that they would be considered 'nicer' than his leather sandals he was wearing which would allow us access to the restaurant.

On our second to last day there we lost all water. No flushing of the toilets and no showering. If I remember correctly the water came on the next day right as we were about to leave for the airport.

Once we got back to the states we found our car in the airport hotel parking lot to be dead. Yup, we had a dead battery. Luckily we found some really nice people to jump our car so we could get on the road towards home.

So really it was not all that bad. And boy were we lucky and blessed to even have the time or money to afford a honeymoon in Mexico. It’s just that the whole week had funny little quarks to it. Ones that will help us remember it for a long long time.

But Matt and I do talk about re-doing our honeymoon. Like truly going on a vacation and calling ourselves honeymooners. Because it was magical and it was amazing and I want to relive that special time with my husband. Someday when we have money and before we have kids we will treat ourselves to a second honeymoon. A honeymoon with a king sized bed, electricity, water and a balcony.