^{St Lucia from the air}

Some of you may remember the story of how my honeymoon got cancelled at the last minute from a few posts back. The travel company we had booked through (just the flights, the hotel was fine) had gone bankrupt 2 weeks before the wedding. That company was Thomas cook.

We were due to depart for Cancun for a luxury experience. We were devastated and tried our best for two weeks to get replacement flights. We nearly had them too. They were even at better times but the downside was that it was going to cost us an additional £1000. By that point I had stopped caring and just wanted it sorted out. So we instructed the travel agent to book it. Two hours later I get a call saying those last seats had been snapped up just before us. bad luck. Honeymoon cancelled completely now. No flights were available anymore, unless we were willing to pay £10,000 for a set of flights (economy flights!). No thanks

After spending a whole day at the travel agents the following day and nearly tearing all my hair out we managed to find a honeymoon trip to St Lucia in the Caribbean. The travel agent even managed to find us a healthy discount so that it would cost the same as our original honeymoon!

So we ended up at a place called the St James Club at Morgan Bay. It was lovely and also our first experience of an all inclusive holiday. Meaning everything was free (or pre-paid) at the resort. Food was free, and there were endless free cocktails. I developed a taste for whiskey sours on that trip and even learned how to make the sour mix for myself when we got home.

I didn't take too many pictures while we were there, but I did take the time to take a couple long exposures and captured a few Caribbean sunsets. Like this one ..

..and this one.

Of course, we didn't spend all of our time at the pool sipping cocktails, though many guests did precisely that. There were quite a few American families and groups there that did nothing but get hammered at the pool bar all day long. Well if that's what you are into for your vacations then that's what you are into .. though one guy did look like his liver was ready to kill him.

There were also excursions you could go on like whale watching, dolphin cruises, a sunset cruise, a rum plantation tour (i REALLY wanted to do this one, but it was cancelled - not enough people), a history tour and more. We booked a bunch of them, but many got cancelled due to it being the off peak tourist season so many excursions got cancelled or rescheduled due to a lack of numbers. For example the rum tour and the dolphin cruise. Those were disappointments, but the history tour was cool and the sunset cruise was pretty awesome too.

Sometimes in the evenings you would get locals and staff from the resort that would wander down to the beach to play soccer. It was fun to watch them play.

I couldn't help but have a sense of envy for them... living in paradise, being able to go to the beach with your friends for a quick game after a long day at work.. of course I am sugar coating it a little. I've lived in the tropics before and living in a place is different from going to that place on vacation. But I would still love to live in the Caribbean at some point in my life. Maybe when steem 'goes to the moon' (who knows what the future has in store for us) or I get a nice lottery win (yeah right).

This was the view from our balcony. It was quite nice and you did have a view of the whole resort from there, although our view of thee beach wasn't the best. I didn't mind. You don't actually spend all that much time in your room when on vacation anyway.

Here's another sunset shot I took.. this one was from a raised pool that overlooked the whole resort and had its own cocktail bar. You could sit in the pool, sip your cocktails and watch the sun go down every evening. It was one of my favourite parts of the trip.

I'm keeping the details of the trip a little light in this post, mostly because .. well.. it was our honeymoon and you don't need to hear about everything we did.. ;) I'm not talking about sex.. though there was that too.. some things just don't need to be shared. I think about those reddit stories of people who went on honeymoon and when they arrived were met by their relatives (usually parents) who decided to join them on their honeymoon. That would be my absolute worst nightmare.

I talked about some of the excursions and experiences you could do on the island.. well, we booked one that was off the charts awesome .. I'll tell you about that one in detail .. in my next post :)

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