Catching up: Jamaica, day one

Derek and I went to San Antonio yesterday, and it was an all day trip, and we were fucking exhausted. So exhausted that we got into a super ugly argument five minutes from home, and we didn't speak for three hours (in fairness, we both came home, stalked into separate corners, and took naps). After we woke up and got over ourselves, I cooked us Mongolian Beef with gailan, and we blew through season one of Sherlock. We decided today would be a super lazy day, and it has been. I have been hell bent on perfecting my stuffed brioche french toast, so this morning was chocolate cherry chevre with mixed jam. I have been infusing the eggs with cooked down rum and cooked brown sugar, and holy fuck, this every Sunday indulgence is god damn AMAZING. I haven't gotten it right yet, and I know why. I need a pastry filler. But barring that, it's still fucking delicious, and I'm pretty attached to the Sunday ritual. This American Life, big breakfast, and sitting at our computers drinking our coffee, working on photos. 

Getting back on track, I went to Jamaica a month ago. 

Perhaps this will illustrate how small I truly am as an individual, but I had never before been out of the country. When my passport arrived in the mail, it hit me that going on my honeymoon was far more than enjoying nine days and eight nights of bliss with my husband, it was making my corner of the universe just a tiny bit bigger. I've always said that was the ultimate point of traveling, so it's not like this was a true revelation. And I've also traveled, but only inside of America. I've been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things. But leaving the country was wholly new, and getting my passport was one of the final nails in the coffin that I was really about to become a bigger person. I was so excited. 

I'm terrified of flying right until the plane starts to taxi. About there, I'm resigned to my fate. If I die, I die. It's completely out of my hands, so I might as well enjoy myself until I explode in the sky. My best friend, Amber, had never flown before. Ever. Because her terror of planes far surpasses mine. To the point where she gets irritated by my jokes about how I could totally die on a flight. She went with Derek and I to the airport, because she was going home the same day that we were going to Jamaica. I was a very good girl, and spent the entire four hours we were at the airport without a single joke about dying in transit to Jamaica. 

Amber and I having breakfast, sans death jokes.

Derek and I had two flights to take: Denver to Dallas, and Dallas to Negril.

If I look like I've been crying in that picture, it's because I had been. I was SO FREAKED OUT about flying internationally, despite my excitement about making my wold bigger. Our flights combined were only six hours. I cried for four of them, and slept for the other two. In fact, I worried myself into such a frenzy that I felt sick when we landed in Jamaica. Only a mild sick, though. Going through customs was so fucking COOL for me, and an absolute breeze. I expected it to take at least an hour; it took ten minutes, and that's a generous estimate. 

We had a representative from our resort waiting to escort us to a luxurious lounge area, and this is when the heat and the humidity hit me, and every step I took escalated my feelings of disgusting sick. They offered Derek and I drinks, and I asked for water, and sat down feeling crabby and revolting and anxious and tired. We were informed that we had a two hour drive from the airport to the resort, and I got a bit more green around the gills thinking of the bumpy car ride that the man was explaining to us. The only nice thing that happened on the way from the airport to the resort was the air conditioning in the car. I fell into a tumbling sleep the second I sat down in our (quite posh) transport van. 

When we arrived at the hotel, a very excited Derek and a really heat sick and dehydrated Drea were given the option to take boozy refreshments. Derek took them, I asked for water, and then threw a temper tantrum over having to fill out arrival paperwork. But only internally. I felt more sick by the second, and listening to Derek exclaim over how gorgeous our hotel was (it really fucking was), and how delicious his drink was, and how good the ocean smelled (all true things) only seemed to make it worse. Derek and I walked up to our third floor suite, he went and sat down on the balcony, and I shed my clothes and limply got into bed, hoping I would feel better soon. 

I took a nap, Derek went down to eat, and when I woke up, I was so incredibly thirsty, but also terrified to drink local water. I drank it, anyway. It's not like Colorado water, but it's definitely good enough to drink. 

My hotel room (which was a MASSIVE suite. Fuck yeah! But it's easier to say hotel room, or just room, and it also lowers how god damn pretentious and disgustingly obsessed with status symbols I sound) was comfortably warm, and comfortably humid, and it smelled like the saltiness and slightly fishy undertone of the ocean. In retrospect, I'm so disappointed I felt too sick to enjoy it in that moment. Derek was going on about how he'd walked around the hotel and he was excited to see it in the daylight. 

I turned on Last Week Tonight, and hoped I'd feel better after a full night's rest. 

Thinking back on it now, it was SO disappointing to arrive into a foreign country for the first time and to feel so absolutely miserable. I wanted to exclaim and feel excited, and be totally immersed in the fact that I was so far from home, and I was so far from where I was a member of the status quo. 

But I'd certainly have that moment. I had eight days ahead of me that were full of them.