Yeah Mon!

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N!!!

One perk about being a teacher is the vacations, spring break, Christmas, holidays and summer vacation.  I honestly do not think I would be able to make it as a full-time teacher without having breaks. I would be soo burned out, ask any teacher, I think they might just feel the same way.  

I never went on a spring break before, not in high school, or college. I mean I was saving in high school and I was pretty broke in college. Gary and I have gone to New Orleans on two of our spring breaks, which was great and lots of fun, but we wanted to go some place where we could just sit, read and soak up the sun. Enter spring break planning.  Enter partners in crime, some fellow teachers :-)  We ended up booking our trip in January, the cheapest place that we could find a good all-inclusive deal was in Jamaica.  I have never been there before and I don't think one of the other couples had either, but the other couple was just there on their honeymoon about a year ago. But we stayed at a different place and this time we were with friends! 

I used Book-it.com to make the reservation, I had used it in the past when we went to Italy, they seem to have some pretty good deals.  Tripadvisor is another good website to get ratings of different hotels.  Sometimes though people are just too picky, too "diva."  We booked at the Royal Decameron Club Caribbean.  There were some really cute "villas" that you could get, but way out of our price range, some of these were right on the beach.  You can't really say that ours was off the resort, but it was right on the edge. The rooms weren't huge, but I didn't plan on spending a whole lot of time in them anyway. They were clean- huge points with me! The bathroom wasn't anything to write home about, but again, CLEAN, with good lighting! The shower curtain was not gross and grimy, another huge point!  The bed was king size, no gross bedspread (that's one thing I hate sometimes about hotels/motels).  We also had a closet and a flat screen TV with LOTS of channels, again not that we planned on really watching much TV.  We had a little sitting area outside our room with two Adirondack chairs.  

There were two restaurants that we could make reservations at: a Thai and a seafood, we ate at both, nothing fabulous.  I ended up getting the "steak" and potatoes for dinner at the seafood restaurant, per recommendation of our fabulous waitress we had for 3 nights.  Can I just say that the two nights we had reservations we also ended up going to the buffet too! DON'T judge:-) Free is free.....More dinner for dessert, yes please!

The beach was great, looong, water was warm and they had a trampoline out in the middle of the water.  Now, I am no Michael Phelps, so getting out there was a little difficult, but I did it, twice! 
I also went snorkeling twice too. The first time I freaked out there were tons of sea urchins all over the ocean floor.  The second time I went out I used a life jacket, to keep me afloat.  Very helpful! 


Our routine went as follows:  

• Get up, apply sunscreen ALL over
• Go to breakfast buffet
•  Head out to "our spot"  very near to the swing bar (that's what we labeled it)
• Read, soak up sun, nap, occasionally cool off in the ocean
• Lunch buffet
• Soak up more sun, swim, or for the paler ones sit in the shade of the umbrellas up by the bar
• Break in the shade, nap/read
• Shower, change
• Dinner buffet
• Drinks - throughout the day
• Nightly entertainment

* Repeat for following days :-)