Paradise

It's been a little while since my last post because Lee and I just got back from the Bahamas!  We went to Atlantis resort, a vacation spot on our bucket list for a while, and let me tell you it did not disappoint!  What an amazing resort!  It was absolutely MASSIVE, which at first we thought was a negative thing since we felt completely lost and overwhelmed the first day!  We had no idea where we were going and even the map was so big that we couldn't really figure out where stuff was!  But it soon became a fun adventure trying to figure out ways to get where we wanted and exploring new things.  I seriously am not sure if we ever walked the same route twice! We tried, but somehow we always ended up taking a turn that we thought we took last time, but soon realized we were now seeing something else that was new and cool and we hadn't seen before!  It took us a couple days to discover this really neat marina that was behind one of the hotel towers, when we happened to go out a back door.  It was full of cute little stores, and icecream shop and the most amazing yachts I have ever seen!  Lee called it his spiritual Babylon because he couldn't help covet those boats!!  Ha ha.  They were all lit up at night and stuff too.  We spent a lot of evenings walking through the marina and there was live entertainment sometimes too.  Our resort also had a free movie theatre that was pretty neat so we did that a couple nights.  The best part of the resort was "Aquaventure", this huge waterpark.  It had a "Rapid River" that you rode tubes around that took about an hour to go through, and it was wonderful!  We spent most of our time on that!  It took you through some wild rapids and up conveyer belts and down some really fun waterslides.  The coolest one was straight down and then it shot you right back up the other side like a rollar coaster. So fun!  There were some other slides too, some that went through a tube that had sharks swimming around you (kind of sounds cooler than it actually was).  There were so many pools and beaches and places you could go and none of them were really that busy.  It was great to explore and go to different places.  We tried snorkelling a couple times - it wasn't the best snorkelling we've seen, but we did see some cool fish.  We really didn't leave the resort since the rest of the island is kind of in poverty, and it would be a little scary I think.  Plus we definitely had everything we needed right there.  As long as we were willing to walk!  Our feet were so sore by the end of the trip.  The only negative thing I would say about the Bahamas was that it was really windy the whole time!  And sometimes cloudy... which made it feel pretty cold.  But most of the time it was sheltered enough that we could still enjoy everything that we wanted to do!  But if you notice in most of the pictures I have posted, it is cloudy and windy looking - that is because we got the camera out only when it got too cold to enjoy the water!  It really was sunny more of the time.  We also really loved the food in the restaurants there!  It was pretty darn expensive, but definitely DELICIOUS!  I especially liked this authentic BBQ place that had HUGE family size portions - you should have seen the Nachos Lee and I got as an appetizer, we barely made a dent!  The had probably a whole block of cheese on them and tons of delicious shredded BBQ pork! SO good.  There were some fancy and amazing buffets too.  So basically we ate hardly anything for breakfast and lunch to save money and the pigged out for dinner! Yum.  Food is one of my favorite things about a vacation, I LOVE eating out!!
The whole trip was a lot of fun, and I love spending time with just Lee and I together, it's just a neat feeling to be able to focus only on ourselves.  So THANK GOODNESS for wonderful parents (and siblings that helped out too) that took great care of our kids while we were away!  They probably had more fun than when we are home, and the house was probably kept cleaner too!  Still don't understand how my Mom does it!  We were so grateful for this time away, and it made me appreciate my kids more.  I totally missed them by the end of the trip.  We just kept talking about how much they would love it there and when we would bring them back there one day!

   

Oh and one more CRAZY thing.... We had originallly booked this trip for 2 weeks earlier, but due to us wanting to be in Calgary for the temple dedication, and also wanting to give my parents more time to get over jet lag from their trip, we changed the date.  And I really would probably not have bothered but it worked out so that I even was able to save money by changing it.  And HALLELUJAH that I did!  We found out that there was a hurricane that hit the Bahamas right during the time we would have been there!  The Atlantis resort was put on lockdown and they sent a bunch of people home early.  That would have been super scary, I am so glad we narrowly missed it!  Definitely feel like we are watched over and protected!!