Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation

Now for the fun part...the honeymoon! :) Thanks to Mark's awesome parents we were able to go on a Caribbean cruise for our honeymoon that made a stop in Cozumel, Mexico for a day. It was a lot of fun and we plan on going on another cruise sometime in the future. The cruise left from Mobile, Alabama so after everything in Missouri we flew down to AL for a few days to spend time with Mark's family and to have a small open house for all their friends down there. We got to spend some time with Mark's brother and his family as well which was fun and his sister-in-law even made us a delicious cake for the open house. She is an amazing cook, let me tell you! Anywho- it was great to be able to spend more time with his family and get to know them all a little better.

I don't even know where to really start for the cruise...except it was awesome! There was a lot to do on the ship and TONS to eat...what they say about cruises and food is completely true. I don't think I've ever eaten so much or felt so disgustingly full in my entire life! But it was so amazingly good! First of all there was a buffet for every meal, a 24-hour pizzeria (which had very good pizza), a 24-hour ice cream thing (we certainly made use of that! I don't think I've ever eaten so many ice cream cones!), and then at night we had dinner at the Seven Seas Dining room where we were served like kings and queens.

We had the same server every night and ours was this kind of intense Russian chick (she wouldn't let me order a gourmet hamburger cuz she thought it wasn't appropriate for a nice dining room like that...) who was pretty funny in her own way. They had amazing bread to start off with, then appetizers, the main course, and dessert! It was so hard to eat everything cuz we were usually still full from lunch and breakfast but we couldn't pass up the good stuff (as my nephew Joe would say :) so we made room for it. The menus changed every night so there was always something yummy and new to try.

We also had the same dining group every night and ours was pretty interesting. There was a middle-aged couple, a younger couple, and then a couple I wasn't sure about cuz he was pretty darn old and she was fairly young but none of us ever got the full story on that one and they only came twice to eat with us. Our last night there was pretty cool though because they brought Mark and I out this special dessert after the meal and sang a happy honeymoon song to us, quite embarrassing but the cake was D-licious!

As I said, there was quite a bit to do on the ship. Every night there was a show (they have a dance group that had a themed show every night) and one night they had an amazing juggler and comedian perform. During the day they had bingo, dance classes, games, swimming, mini-golf, and a bunch of other stuff I can't really remember at the moment. One thing we liked was they had this demonstration class for the towel animals they make. Every night they come and clean up your room, leave the itinerary for the next day, and next to it is a towel animal they make. So they had a class showing you how to make them so we went and did it and it was pretty cool. They had an entire book of things you could make with the towels and they were really neat. Mark really seemed to enjoy making them as you can see :)

One other thing we enjoyed was just walking around the ship and going up on the top front deck and looking out at the ocean. It was so pretty, especially the sunsets and the moon, but very windy! I couldn't leave my hair down hardly at all cuz it was so windy outside all the time. Mark was always on the look out for dolphins and such but the only thing we really saw was a flying fish which was pretty cool.

So we finally made it to Cozumel and it was SO gorgeous! We couldn't get over how freaking blue the water was. It was amazing. There were a lot of things to do in Cozumel to choose from- swimming with dolphins, snorkeling, scuba-diving, sailing, etc. We chose the snorkeling which was so much fun! We were out there for 3 hours and went snorkeling in three different spots along the reef. The reef was damaged in a hurricane so it wasn't as amazing as it could have been but it was still fun and we saw lots of fishes. The coolest probably was this huge school of fish, it was massive, and it had this huge barracuda swimming near it. We bought an under water camera but a lot of the pics were pretty dark and the school of fish didn't turn out, although you can kinda see the barracuda. We did look pretty funny with all the gear on though. The only downside to the whole experience was that I did get burnt, but only on my back since we had our backs to the sun pretty much the entire time. I put sunscreen on like 3 times and still got burnt! So not fair. It was pretty bad though and was still red three weeks later...curse of being a redhead! :)