On travel

Where we stayed; image via

Andy and I got married in July of 2008. We honeymooned for a week in Jamaica, which was awesome. And since I have nothing to talk about today (to type about?), I'm going to share the oh-so-charming story of the first day of our honeymoon. Don't worry, it's not any weird sex story or anything. Promise.

Our flight left somewhere around 6 in the morning. Which meant getting to the airport around 4:30. Which meant waking up at 4. Which is not so good for me. I have two possible emotions upon waking: confusion or rage. Thankfully, that morning, my body went with "confusion," and we were both totally packed so we got out the door without much incident.

In the airport, Andy's bag set off one of the detectors, necessitating a search by hand. The offending item: a full-size tube of sunscreen, grabbed at the last second by Andy in a thoughtful moment. He knows I burn easily and saw the sunscreen sitting on the shelf in the bathroom, so he assumed I had forgotten it. (He didn't know I had two different kinds of sunscreen in my packed luggage.) Because it was still before five in the morning, I stared at him, incredulous, and demanded to know why he had packed more than three ounces of liquid in his carry-on. He paused, and said, "Well, I didn't memorize the TSA guidelines like you did, and I didn't want you to burn." So then I felt like an asshole for a while.

The flights were fine, customs was a pain, someone on the shuttle to the resort stole my glasses. I am not kidding. Apparently health care in Jamaica is really expensive so there's a big market for stuff like that. (Don't worry, I had my contacts.)

When we arrived at the resort, the room wasn't ready yet. We left our stuff in a locked room, changed into suits, and headed for the beach. On the way we stopped by the waterfront bar. Many bartenders at all-inclusive resorts are coached to pour lightly; I can assure you that if such a direction was given to our bartenders, they roundly ignored it. I spent my first three hours at the resort drinking a lot of rum and laying in the sun.

Once they notified us that our room was ready, we moved our stuff and decided to take a nap in the nice, cool sheets. We were, by four in the afternoon, drunk enough that we didn't even want to use the bed for other purposes. We just wanted a nap.

When I woke up, I had that awful, groggy, hungover feeling that comes from too much sun and rum and sleeping. I had napped for over two hours. I felt terrible. We decided to go see if dinner would help settle my stomach. We were on our honeymoon! I couldn't feel crappy!

Dinner was fine, except our seat: we were directly under a ceiling fan, which was directly under a light. Which meant the whole table was treated to a strobe-light effect. Ever feel hungover and nauseous and then sit under a strobe light?

Which is how I spent the first night of my honeymoon puking over a fence into the bushes outside the dining room, then going to bed at eight. I win at romance.