Anyway, our honeymoon started out a little rough. Not terribly bad considering both of us were still on cloud nine from being married. But still, not how you would hope your honeymoon would begin.
It all started out when we were sitting at the airport waiting for our flight. I got online to transfer the money from all the wonderful gifts we received via Traveler's Joy. (Those of you who aren't familiar with this site - it allowed us to register for things to do on our honeymoon and people could buy us activities instead of toasters and blenders.) Basically the site transfers any money that was purchased for the gifts into your PayPal account and you can use it to purchase those activities when you arrive at your destination.
As I was going through the transfer process I read a bit of fine print that I didn't see before. Apparently it takes about 5-7 business days for the funds to actually be available. And after they're in PayPal, it's another few days for the funds to be transferred into your bank account. I believe my exact thoughts were, "Oh, crap." Joe and I had both pretty much spent every penny we had on making the wedding possible. We only had about $300 to our name for everything that week....food, activities, tips, etc. Not exactly how we pictured our honeymoon to be. BUT we didn't let it get to us. We decided to pick two activities and be pretty frugal with our food money and still have a good time.
But that wasn't the last of our rough start. When we landed at the airport in Cabo, there were all these people trying to get our attention as we walked out of customs. I, for one, hate to be haggled at....if that's even using the term properly, but I think you know what I mean. I won't give someone the time of day if they are yelling and pushing me to look at whatever they're selling, no matter how badly I want it. Oh, but not Joe...he has tougher skin than me :) One of the men yelling caught Joe's attention. So, we proceeded to be sold the idea that if we went to a timeshare meeting at the resort the following day we would not only get a free ride to and from the resort, but we would also get a free activity of our choice and a discount card for any of the other activities we wanted to participate in. (I promise, story time is ending and the pictures are coming soon). SO, trying to be a supportive brand new wife I let Joe agree to the deal. Need I remind you that pushy people trying to sell me something makes my skin crawl....so a timeshare meeting sounded a bit like hell. But they had a free breakfast for us, and I like food quite a bit, so I told myself I would survive.
Now, I should probably also mention that what I envisioned was us going to a group sales pitch and then leaving after it was over. Two hours tops, I think. Wrong. So, so wrong. Turns out it's a one-on-one sales presentation and breakfast is a lot less enjoyable when you know the person really doesn't care about you and just wants to make the sale. We had also been upfront with the pushy airport man that we weren't interested in buying a timeshare, we just wanted the free stuff. And that's pretty much what we said to pushy breakfast sales man. But he proceeded to keep us for four hours....walking around the resort, telling us how it would help our kids some day and blah blah blah. He tried every angle.
Towards the end we went to their timeshare office where other people were getting pressured by their sales people and the guy basically tells us that we can afford it, even though we think we can't. He asks us to name a price and we said we would pay $100 a month, but that we honestly didn't have any money at the moment. Oh, it just irks me how he thought he knew our financials better than we knew ourselves. He finally brought the price down to $200 a month, but that was with a $20,000 down payment. I almost started laughing out loud in his face and walked out. But after four hours I wanted my free activity and discount card, dang it! So then we finally get him to realize that it's not going to happen and he said he'd be right back. Then comes over even pushier young sales buck/manager. He didn't keep us for too long and then we were finally free....or so we thought. They bid us farewell and told us to go speak to this other guy for our free activity card. Turns out he was just another salesman trying one last shot at us. This is where my Irish temper started to come out. I mean....really....it was SO frustrating. So in the nicest way possible, which probably wasn't so nice, I stopped the guy dead in his sales pitch tracks and told him to shove off and that it wasn't going to happen. My frustration was evident as I explained that we had been honest from the get go, and that we had sat through an entire morning of nonsense on the first day of our honeymoon and I wanted no more of it. Thankfully he shut up and sent us to the office that would give us our discount card.
I thought it was over...I really did. So naive of me. After they gave us our free activity they tried to sell us on an even bigger discount card if we sat through another timeshare pitch at another hotel. I wanted to spit in their faces. But thankfully Joe is more tactful than I am, and when I gave him the look that said, "Please, you cannot put me through another one of these," he told them no. And then we walked away. PHEW. One of the worst experiences of my life. Even if I was interested, I would have never bought a timeshare from them because of the way they conducted the business.
ANYWAY.......after that point we proceeded to have a GREAT honeymoon. When we checked in we saw that we had a little kitchenette. Complete with real dishes, a stove, microwave, sink and fridge. We also saw that there was a Walmart super close to the hotel and people were always bringing in groceries. So we took this awesome little bus with a driver who looked like he was 12 to the Walmart and got ourselves way too much food.
I found microwave popcorn ( I am addicted).
Joe found bread that he remembered loving from his mission (he served in Mexico).
Joe did get sick one day and we spent the entire day in the hotel room watching movies on TV. I ran out to get him some medicine at the resort's little market, but other than that, it was TV. Which was actually really nice and relaxing.
Here are a few other highlights of the trip:
We each got Henna tatoos on our shoulders, "Mr" & "Mrs". Cheesy, I know, when else can you be super cheesy in public besides your honeymoon? We had to take advantage of that while we could.
Our view from the beach in front of our hotel. Pretty rad:
I made friends with about 15 little birds (no joke) one lunch and felt like Snow White. I resisted the urge to break out in song. Joe now calls me the 'Bird Whisperer'.....I'm still not quite sure if I should take that as a compliment. (Look close, a few birds are in the shot).
Classic pool shot. And yes, that is a pirate ship in our pool. It was actually a really cool restaurant/bar that had a hot tub in it and everything.
The free activity we chose from the awful timeshare pitch was a dinner and dance cruise. It would have been awesome except for a few things:
A) It was freezing cold and windy, for which we were not prepared.
B) Joe got sick and barely could eat his food.
C) There was one really drunk, loud woman who was a bit past her party days. Not a good combination.
But, all in all, we would do it again. Only next time we'll bring Dramamine, a jacket and ear plugs.
We had lunch one day at this awesome restaurant that was literally in the sand about 100 feet up from the ocean water. The service was great and we were the only people there, which was so nice.
There was a bit of this goin' on occasionally:
One night we went on this amazing horseback riding trip. The guide picked us up after it was dark, at about 8pm and then we were able to walk/run the horses a long way down the beach, sometimes even in the water. When we got to the end, he let the horses rest while he did some cool tricks for us. It was so awesome.
One of the activities we were stoked to do was Parasailing. I've wanted to do this since I was a little girl. We went out at our scheduled time and it was too windy for them to let us go. So we re-scheduled. This time we were able to get on the boat and watched 5 other people go before they told us that it was too windy. SO sad. But next time, we'll go for sure! This was when we found out it wasn't going to happen:
We got ice cream cones one day at this ice cream shop the resort had. The ice cream was a little freezer burned, but on a hot day, we didn't care.
One of the other things we got to do was Jet Skiing out in the ocean. That was a blast. Joe let me drive most of the time since they were a bit too slow for him. But then I let him take us out to the famous Arch and do some small tricks.
Another fun adventure was taking a glass bottom boat out to Lover's Beach. Seeing all those fish made me not very willing to touch the water...ever. So when we saw this cool cave as we were boating in the only way to get there besides swimming was to rock climb. Pretty cool, but Joe had to help me in a few spots.
On our last night we got dressed up and headed over to one of the resort's restaurants. They made a killer pizza and we had a romantic sunset and candlelight dinner. It was the perfect ending to our honeymoon.
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