Yeah Mun: Sojourn to Jamaica

It occurs to me that I never actually posted about our honeymoon.  Clearly, the time has come.

Our flight to Jamaica was a red eye in every sense of the word.  As you may remember, we did not have a ton of money to spend on the honeymoon as we were mostly relying on our honeymoon registry to make it happen, so we had to take the cheapest flight available.

Sunday morning (the day after the wedding), we were still in Marin.  Though our flight left from San Francisco, we had to drive back to San Jose to drop off a bunch of wedding stuff which meant we needed to budget about 2.5 hours for driving that day.  Lame.  I think by the time we got home and did the repacking we needed to do, we had about an hour before we had to leave to relax.

Obviously, I was already exhausted at this point, not having had a good night's sleep for several months but having been particularly busy and not asleep for the past few weeks.  On top of that, our plane left around midnight.  I cannot sleep on planes.  Or any other moving vehicle for that matter.  I'm just really bad at it.

By the time we got to the airport, and that is a story in itself (decided last minute to spurn public transit, tried to park at BART [subway] and couldn't, and ended up having to park in long-term airport parking.  Woops), we were so tired that I thought even I might have a chance of sleeping on the plane, and I think I may have got in half-an-hour or so.  The thing was, we had a stop, so we didn't really have much time to sleep anyway.

We got to Texas (goodbye promise to never use the George W. Bush airport) around 6 in the morning, and something amazing happened.

Now, I don't just have trouble sleeping on moving vehicles.  I have trouble sleeping in dark, silent rooms at night.  That is to say, I have trouble sleeping all the time, so trying to sleep in a bright, busy airport for me is like trying to become CEO of Disneyland.  Ain't never going to happen.

Clearly, I had never been as tired in my life as I was on that airport floor because I actually fell asleep for a bit.

The honeymoon, for me, was about recovery as much as it was about celebrating our marriage.  I needed a vacation more than I can possibly express.  My airport nap proved that.

I don't think I slept on the plane to Jamaica.  One can only ask so much after all.  It was funny though, as we were waiting to get on the plane, a number of other disheveled newlyweds crept into line around us.  Really makes you realize just how "special" a honeymoon in the Caribbean is.

Anyway, after we had got to the airport and gone through customs and stuff, a shuttle met us to take us to the resort.

Now, I had no idea how big Jamaica was or how long it would take.  Previous experience with this sort of thing lead me to expect about half-an-hour at most.

I think it took an hour-and-a-half to get there.  At that point, I was even more exhausted than I had been in Texas.  How do I know?  I fell asleep on the bus.  Without even trying.  In full sunlight with people around me and massive bumps in the road.  That was truly unprecedented in my life and solid proof that weddings fucking drain the life out of you.  I hope never to be that tired again, but I am kind of proud of myself for falling asleep like that.  It may never happen again.

When we finally got to the hotel, we had to stand in a massive line before getting our room.  It was hot and sticky, and I wanted nothing more than to be able to lay down.  I was too sick and hungry to even accept the cocktails they offered us in line.

Finally, finally, we got to our room, and I basically collapsed onto the bed, not planning to get up again for about a year.

Getting to Jamaica was the worst travel experience I have ever had.  I mean, most of that was because of the exhaustion, but doing the whole red eye and transfer planes thing while taking so long to get to the hotel once we actually got there was pretty awful.  We were traveling for almost 24 hours, and it really doesn't need to take that long to get to Jamaica (it's maybe a 6 hour flight from California).

So the moral of this story is if you can take a non-sucky flight to your honeymoon, do it.  If you can't, make sure you have a week at least wherever you're going because it's just not going to be worth it otherwise.  And trust me, you are not going to do anything in your first 24 hours there, so don't plan on jumping right into activities.

What was your trip to your honeymoon like?  Did you take traveling into account when you planned it?