Greetings from Jamaica

We're on Day 2 of our honeymoon at Sandals Whitehouse in Jamaica and loving every minute of it!!!! Our trip down yesterday--while it started at the early hour of 4am!--was smooth and uneventful. Here's the first shot I snapped, from our 4th floor balcony in the Italian village.


To the left of the fountain is a hot tub. We haven't tried it yet, but the week is still young! :)

We had lunch yesterday (Monday) at Bluefield's Beach Club. Chris convinced me to try jerk chicken, and while I admit it was tasty, I'm a spice wimp and quickly learned to avoid most things with "jerk" in the title. We got a much-needed nap in yesterday afternoon then headed to Bayside for dinner, and stopped at Cafe de Paris for some sweets. We decided to walk the beach the length of the resort.

This morning (Tuesday), we went to Bayside's again for breakfast and had nice conversation and good food. I particularly enjoyed the fried plantains (a relative of bananas--would go great with a bowl of vanilla ice cream!!!) and Chris particularly liked the pepper chicken. While it was sunny, we had lots of amazing clouds, so we decided to walk the beach (yeah, I'm paying for not putting sunscreen on earlier!!!). We walked the ENTIRE cleared beach, even off-property, which was the best part. Sandals keeps their beaches immaculate--as I expect for the $ I'm paying--but just beyond the resort, we found some neat shells and saw some buzzard-like birds with huge wingspans. (We asked the security guard and he said the birds eat sand crabs and dead fish).


Here are my shells (quarantined to the balcony ashtray for a few hours to be sure there were no critters in the room!)

We laid on the beach for a while and took a swim in the ocean. We saw at least 6 different types of starfish and the water was cool and clear. I'm not a fan of slimy things, so the seaweed was a little creepy and Chris had something scamper under his foot which promptly sent me swimming for shore.

We enjoyed lunch at Arizona's and spent a little more time on the beach in the shade of a tree. The clouds were getting a bit ominous, so we decided to watch the storm roll in from the balcony. And it was one heck of a storm!!! I haven't heard/seen lightening and thunder like that in a while!

This was taken while we felt it was still safe enough to be on the balcony! The water was getting pretty rough and these were the chairs we'd been sitting in a short time before.


Here the storm was really getting going. This is our view of the mountain to the left.


We lounged and relaxed before dinner at Giuseppe's, a fancier Italian restaurant. I belong to a messageboard dedicated to this resort, and there are several others from the board here this week. There is one couple who is staying just a floor below us, and we sorta-kinda kept running into each other. We briefly said hello yesterday and have been talking online (and we seem to have the same tastes--we've been at the same restaurants at nearly the same time each day!) We were walking down the steps to dinner and ran into them, and finally had a more proper introduction. Turns out they also had reservations at Giuseppe's at the same time, so we ended up having a nice meal with them.

Tonight is White Night (wear something white) and they have the chocolate buffet in an hour or so (who's brilliant idea was it to do white night and chocolate at the same time?!?!?!??!) We'll be heading out shortly for another lovely evening, and I'm looking forward to another morning that looks like this....