Our original plans for this vacation were to relax and lay out. Again, we kinda thought it’d be like a trip to Mexico or somewhere VERY warm. It wasn’t…so plans had to change. Another planned that changed were massages. I LOVE getting a couples massage when we go on vacation together and when we found out Aflac was hooking us up with $400 spending money we thought we’d for sure be doing that. Guess how much the couples massage was??? $387!!! Umm no.
During dinner on night 2 Chuck was talking about going golfing and mentioned that it was “only” $100 to play. I told Zach he really should go. I mean he earned the trip, he deserved to get a reward for it and how many times will he get the opportunity to golf in such a beautiful place? Plus I honestly was looking forward to some downtime for myself! I looked into getting some type of spa treatment but it was just all too overpriced and our goal on these trips is always not to spend ANY of our own money. I ended up sleeping in then going to the pool and reading. I brought along Something Borrowed and started and finished it while on the trip. I forgot what a fun read it is!
Zach got back around noonish so we decided to head to the beach. The hotel wasn’t located directly on the beach but they had a wonderful beach club as part of their property. We took the shuttle over and ate lunch there (before coming on the trip I did my research and knew it was the cheapest place to get food from the hotel!). It was pretty good and decently cheap, at least compared to everywhere else!
We enjoyed relaxing by the water but I was over it pretty quickly. The wind was pretty fierce and getting sand all over me wasn’t super awesome. However, the AMAZING scenery made it well worth it!!!
Zach is all about activity so he played in the water and told me I had to come climb these rocks with him…I wasn’t getting much sun so I was down for some adventure 🙂
We got to see some HUGE pretty fish swimming in the clear water, so cool!
I KNOW landscape shots are mega boring and lame, but it was so pretty there that I couldn’t just pick one!
Some pics of us on the rocks
view of the beach club
We decided to head back to the room pretty early so we could rest and watch some more of The Office Season 5. It rained on our way back and when we got to the room we could see a full double rainbow from our balcony!!! It’s hard to see them both in the pictures, but it was a neat sight!
I took a shower and this is how I found Zach when I got out 😉
That night was the Awards Banquet. Aflac always has a cocktail hour before so we have learned to skip it…it’s a bunch of people enjoying free drinks, not really our scene 🙂 We snuck in right as the dinner was starting which was a little embarrassing but we rolled with it! We sat with some nice people and I especially enjoyed talking to this sweet older lady (she was the guest of her daughter). She has MS and hearing her positive outlook on life was so refreshing. I enjoyed her company AND the dinner. Omg some of the best lobster I’ve ever had outside of Maine!!!
It was neat to see Zach accept his award and this year they are HUGE trophy type things from Tiffany’s of all places! How random is that?!? Zach got a picture with the trophy, the head of advertising (who we met on our “top secret” trip to Columbus!), our territory director, and the CEO of the company. I have to order it from Shutterfly (which is kinda dumb in my opinion, why couldn’t they just let us have a digital copy for free?) so I’ll add it later! I totally ruined this pic by rockin’ my Aflac name tag haha
For Day 4 I knew I couldn’t spend another day attempting to lay out in weather that was scorching hot one minute then so cold I had to wrap myself in towels the next so I proposed that we could spend the day exploring some of the city life in Bermuda. We got up early to head out!
View of the pool from our room
Beautiful view huh?
Like I’ve mentioned, Bermuda wasn’t cheap! We decided to eat candy from the minibar everyday for breakfast. It was the cheapest thing available and it held us over long enough for lunch! We actually ended up finding candy when we went downtown and bought some to replace the candy we had eaten so we didn’t get charged for it, sneaky huh?
KitKat and prenatal vitamins, yummy mix 😉
We caught this cute trolley to the bus stop and rode the bus line to Hamilton
I have NO clue how far 9.2 km is but when you’re pregnant and get sick super easy it’s FAR. The roads there are very narrow and the drivers are INSANE. I literally felt like puking and told Zach we would NOT be riding the bus back. I actually got motion sickness everyday of the trip. The bus from the airport, the boat ride, the trolley to the beach, this bus ride, a bus ride that night and the bus ride to the airport again. Not fun and it makes me SO nervous for our cruise in Oct!!!!
Riding the bus and showing off my new Stella and Dot jewels! The Toujours Necklace and matching earrings, perfect for summer!
My main reason for wanting to go to Hamilton was to get souvenirs. We have a tradition of getting a Christmas ornament everywhere we go and I also wanted to get something for Kye and something for our parents for helping watch him that week for us. At first everywhere we went was (shocker!) over-priced, but we found one little gift shop with our kind of prices. We got a cute ornament, adorable trivets as gifts for our parents, and a cool Bermuda cup for Kye. All that for only $20 which is pretty good I thought!
We also ended up finding a shop that I could have gone BROKE in. It had wonderful things that would look great in our house. We loved everything that we simply walked around the store looking at price tags seeing if we could afford any of it. For the first time in probably a YEAR I got really sentimental about Nana. I know that’s random but it was the type of store she would have LOVED and I had a tough time holding back tears. We ended up getting three cards of Bermuda scenes that I took to Hobby Lobby and got framed for our guest bathroom and a precious set of pineapple salt and pepper shaker for our kitchen (for a total of $30, again not bad considering!).
We asked around where the best local spot for food was. We’ve learned if you find a place the locals eat it’s usually good and usually cheap. We had to walk a good bit (but hey, exercise won’t hurt me!) but we ended up eating at The Spot and it was good! My plain grilled cheese sandwich was $6, with no side, and we thought we lucked out on the prices. Haha I know I keep beating a dead horse but I seriously can’t get over the expense of stuff there!!!
We even treated ourselves to HUGE yummy milkshakes!
After we bought our goodies and ate we were ready to head back. We knew our hotel had a sister hotel in Hamilton that offered a free boat shuttle back to our place so we took the nice long walk to get there in time to hit up the 1:30 shuttle back!
I love how beachy all the buildings are!
taking a quick breather 😉
I got this dress at Old Navy for $2, can you believe that? Casey has two of them!
At the sister hotel we saw the same archway that was in the trivet we bought for Zach’s parents! We later learned that it’s some special arch and many of them are all over Bermuda…if you kiss under it you’ll have a happy life together 🙂 Fitting for Mr. Rusty and Mrs. Charlotte!
Editing all these pictures made me laugh…Zach was squinting SO bad b/c the sun!
I’m telling you we LOVED the panoramic feature!
First ones waiting for the shuttle boat!
A semi-non squinting pic
Day 4 was a BUSY day so I’m doing another post to cover the second part of it!
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