home, sweet humid, home

Well.... we made it back in one piece! After 3 flights (one of which was aboard a propeller plane! And it was surprisingly smooth I might add), 4 and a half hours total layover time, and crazy airport traffic at Midway, we are finally HOME :)
As much as we both enjoyed everything Exuma, I have to say that I was feeling a tad bit homesick when yesterday morning rolled around. I could only imagine the jungle that my garden must have become during our travels. I was excited to get back home to see how many new tomato plants had put on tomatoes (we have 20 plants and they are all different). Chris, on the other hand, did NOT share these same feelings. The only thing he was worried about was his cattle and how they were dealing with the heatwave that struck while we were away.
My dad and his girlfriend, Crystal, picked us up at the airport and I don't think there was a quiet moment between the trunk lid slamming shut at MDW and our luggage being wheeled/dragged up the final steps to our front door. We kept telling story after story of our adventures on Exuma. It made me sad to think of all of the stories and little memories that we've already forgotten.
When we walked into our house we were amazed at how much my dad, my brother, Crystal, and Chris's mom Karen did for us while we were away. The office, which I referred to affectionately as  "the wedding disaster area", once filled wall to wall with piles of programs and place cards scarred with typos and stacks of childhood photos destined for our wedding slideshow, is now spotless. This meant more to me than any wedding present! And then, upon inspection of our upstairs bedrooms, we discovered that the bags of clothes and shoes still not unpacked from our move to the new house were freshly laundered and hanging from shiny new organizers. Such a great weight has been lifted and we can actually relax and unwind tonight.

A few things we fell in love with in Exuma: 


1. snorkeling : We spent Chris's birthday on a snorkeling/sightseeing expedition around some of the little known cays of Exuma (we saw actual pirate caves and locations where many scenes from the various Pirates of the Caribbean movies were filmed). After hyperventilating a little when I first got into the water, I sucked it up and joined Chris who was already floating around with his face underwater. We snorkeled over a carpet of coral reefs and literally saw a fish of every color, shape, and size. We were snorkeling a 1/4 mile from where the ocean floor goes from being 20 feet deep to over 6,000 feet deep. We love LOVE loved it!

2. Purple Rain : We had a butler at the resort who would bring us anything we wanted to eat or drink out to our beach chairs everyday. On the first day Chris told him to "surprise us" and our butler came carrying a purple slushy like drink. With one sip we were both blabbing on about how much it tasted like a melted down purple freeze pop! Of course we knew that there was alcohol in it (mostly because we asked him) but we could NOT taste it at all. We could be found with one of these concoctions in our hand every day.

3. The stars : We both have a rekindled love/appreciation for the night sky after noticing, for the first time in a long time,  how beautiful the heavens are. We would walk back from dinner to our villa along the beach at night. With no lights illuminating the beach and hardly any houses or street lights alining the bay, the stars above us never seemed closer or more bright. We just couldn't get over how vivd they looked from that beach. I have a feeling we might be paying more attention now that we are back home.

4. Being kids again : I will never get over the large amount of people who decided to partake in the pool but not the beach at our resort. Why sit in a pool that you could sit in anywhere when you have a breathmtakingly beautiful beach a few steps away? The water there was like liquid neon turquoise green and the surf was high. What better environment could you ask for to splash around and body surf and play games with each other. Like kids, we stayed in the sun and water way to long every day refusing to go in and take a nap until we felt like we were going to pass out from energy loss. Like kids we stubbornly did not reapply our sunscreen as much as we should have and came back to our rooms looking like lobsters many nights. We wouldn't have changed a thing, even with the burns, because every minute spent on the beach was simply perfect.