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 :)

Have you liked the Pink Pineapple Blog on Facebook yet?! If not, do so today :)

Travel Tip Tuesday....AMAZING APP :)

The Pink Pineapple is now on Facebook! Be sure to "like" The Pink Pineapple Blog, today :)
There's nothing worse than being stuck in traffic on the interstate. If you're anything like me, you try to race your GPS to get to your destination. Ha! I know, I know, it changes based on your speed, but I still always seem to see it as a race and I get excited when my lovely GPS, Rose (yes, I named my GPS. don't judge) has to change her final destination time. Even if you're not a crazy who races her GPS like me, you still don't enjoy being stuck in traffic, not matter where or when.

This is what the icon looks like in the App Store :)

My friend, Melinda introduced me to this amazing little gem of an App last summer and I cannot even begin to tell you the amount of headache it has saved me when driving. It's the MapQuest App and it's FREE!!!
It works like a GPS, but what is so amazing about it is that is has a live traffic feed. You simply "ping" yourself and then you can zoom out and see what the traffic is like around you. If it's green it's moving well, yellow is a slight slow down and red means it's basically stopped. It constantly updates and you can even zoom in to see exactly which side of the road the traffic is located so you know if it's going to for sure affect you or not. It is SO useful when traveling

Example: When heading to SC for my bachelorette bash, we checked the app before we headed down into Jellico (if you've ever traveled through there you know what a nightmare it can be) and it was showing up "red".....for miles. So, we switched up the GPS in the car from quickest time, to shortest distance, and it took us on another route to Asheville. The route was about 30 minutes longer than the norm, but the delay was a 4 hours long. My roomie at work was heading to FL that same night,  got stuck in it, and it took him 6.5 hours to get to Knoxville from Lex. Holy stinkin cow.

When M and I headed out to SC last Thrus for my cousin's wedding, we checked the app before entering into the Jellico Monster and saw that there were no delays and decided to for-go our planned detour (we know they've been doing construction and assumed traffic would be insane).

A screen shot of the app from our drive to Asheville

It's seriously awesome and definitely a MUST on my list!

Happy Mapquesting,
Ash

Welcome to our "Vacation Home"

M and I are still living in a hotel and will be here for a few more weeks (if you're new to the blog, our house flooded 4 days before our wedding).
We are less than thrilled with State Farm as they really don't have it together; but, hatred aside, here's a tour of our current digs- the Residence Inn. This hotel, unlike State Farm, is amazing and I am SO pleased with it!!
We will be keeping everyone up to date as our house gets reparied (We are changing up everything and going with a costal cottage theme), but in the mean time, welcome to our little vacation home! Ha!


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7Ixnk2qVsw&feature=youtube_gdata_player



P.S. This blog now has it's own page on FB in an effort to make it easier for people to keep up with new posts! Be sure to 'like' The Pink Pineapple Blog page today!! I'm hoping to start doing giveaway's via it soon, so spread the word!!

Wedding PICTURES :)

Our final wedding images just arrived from our photographer! Here are a few :)
Feel Free to pin away, just please link all images back to this blog so that my awesome photographer gets the due credit he deserves!!!

Photography by Nelson Benton Photography. All images Copyright Protected.