Wedding Wednesday.....Our Honeymoon-ANTIGUA!!

We spent a majority of our honeymoon, 10 days, at Sandals Grande Antigua. We left San Juan (to read about our time in PR, go back a few posts) around 9:30 Tuesday evening and arrived in Antigua an hour or so later. Upon check-in, we found out that we were upgraded about 7 room categories to the Verandah Concierge Suite. Apparently Sandals does this a lot, and we were more than happy to take the upgrade.

Pineapple accents everywhere! I was in LOVE :)

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Caribbean Grove Entrance

The resort is stunning and the grounds are immaculate. It's divided into two parts, the Caribbean Grove side and the Mediterranean Side. The Med side is newer and a big high-rise building where the Caribbean side feels very tropical where no building is over 3 floors tall and is set amongst the trees in a jungle like setting. We chose the Caribbean side because we LOVE having that tropical feel while we are on vacation! Our room was in a great location-almost right in the center between the two sides. We had both big pools within 50 yards of our room-one to either side.

Caribbean Grove Pool

View of resort from Mediterranean Building

At the swim-up bar :)

We set up a honeymoon registry through Honeyfund.com in order to register for all of the 'extras' for our honeymoon- massages, excursions, etc. We lucked out and ended up with about $1300 which made our honeymoon even that much sweeter! I highly recommend making one, especially if you're like us and you don't really need many of the typical registry items!


Here are some pics of some of the fun we had while there-sorry that they're all close-up's we snapped ourselves; that's what happens when you travel sans friends/family!!

We had a couples massage

We went on a sunset cruise

Ate yummy dinners

played in the pool

We went zip-lining through the jungle

We went jet-skiing through the bay

Took sunset walks on the beach

We also rented a car one day and took on the island ourselves. I had to get a temporary British driver's license in order to be able to drive and it was definitely an experience driving on the wrong side of the road! We went all around the island and got to see so many neat places. Antigua must not believe in street signs, because there were none around. We relied heavily on our cartoon map that they gave us at the front desk, but we somehow managed to make it around the island. It is, afterall, only 18 miles from one side to another :)

Our ride-straight off the set of the movie Just Married. Ha :)

With my driver's licence

We even found a pineapple farm- Antigua has a rare "black pineapple"

Sandals sliced and delivered this to the wrong room so I never got to enjoy it :( It smelled AMAZING though!!!

At Devil's Bridge- a rock bridge formed from the waves. So neat!

Then, on our last full day on the island, my sweet husband lost his wedding band.....in the ocean. We were out snorkeling off the shore and when we returned to the pool, we noticed it was gone. We searched and searched and searched some more, but it was gone. Thankfully, we had trip insurance so we will get to replace it. Until then, he's wearing a fabulous temp we purchased at the Antigua Airport! Ha! It even has a spinner band. Amazing.   


Now, for anyone who's wondering my overall thoughts/review of Sandals it's this: It's overpriced. Is it nice? Yes. Is it over-the top amazing? No. We paid a pretty penny to stay here and if it hadn't been for all of our excursions, we would've been very bored. The resort itself, while nice, was pretty boring and full of either 21 year olds or 60 year olds. Not that's anything wrong with either of those groups, but hubs and I weren't into acting like our enitre honeymoon was spring break 02' or our retirement vacay. Ha! There also wasn't much in the way of night-life and you were constantly hounded by spa people about setting up spa appointments. You always had photographers in your face snapping your picture and they charged you a fortune for the excursions and such. We had a great time, but it was not worth the price we paid to stay here-and we got a great deal vs what they normally charge. Would I go back to Sandals? Yes, but only if it was a crazy good deal and the only all inclusive available at the time, otherwise it's just not worth it. There are LOTS of other all-inclusives out there who offer more and cost a lot less!!

Coming next.....Our last stop. South Beach :)

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