Honeymoon in Cancun... or Orlando

Our dream Cancun honeymoon was cancelled the day before our wedding thanks to the wonderful swine flu shutting Cancun down.

So instead Matt and I postponed our honeymoon a month and a half and ended up finding an opening for his parent's timeshare exchange in Orlando. We wanted beach and warm, sunny weather and it worked out. Though I'm still dying to get to Cancun.

We headed out at the end of June and spent a week in Orlando and then another weekend at Clearwater Beach (near Tampa Bay) to get our beach fix.

While in Orlando, we stayed in the Marriott Grande Vista timeshare, which was a HUGE resort. The room was nice for us and we loved having our own little kitchen. I think we made 2 or 3 trips to Walmart for groceries - loved our Oreo's, yogurt, and nutter butters.

We had a wonderful Honeymoon and enjoyed Florida, but don't know that Orlando is a fave of ours. It is definitely made for children and tourists who like to pay a lot of money. One of our first lessons as a married couple was learning the differences between our travel preferences. Matt was completely content with staying in our hotel ALL DAY - watching movies, playing games, TV, sleeping, and relaxing (emerging only for sun and food).

I get more antsy though. I put up with a lot of relaxing but I can only take so much and around 2 pm every day I would start getting anxious to go out and play. Overall I'd say we had a great mix of relaxation and adventure though.

Our resort with its many pools

And its many lakes

Highlights of Orlando:

• The warm weather - minus the random hurricane warnings and rain
• All the theme parks
• The funny names of Florida, including their millions of random lakes. Matt & I had a game of yelling out the names of the lakes that we passed including: BOO BOO LAKE & TURKEY LAKE
• The food mostly - such as Pina Coladas at Bahama Breeze, BJ's Pizza pizookies, the Waffle House, Bubba Gump
• Timeshare presentations - which we took full advantage of and ended up getting a huge discount on 3 day Universal passes and even $75 cash
• Watching movies and relaxing in our hotel
• Our cab driver, Tito, who drove us home in a sweet Chrysler 500 and talked all about his time in jail, his local Ruff Riders motorcycle club and couldn't understand why we weren't going out dancing

Quirks of our time in Orlando:

• Keri forgot all of her garments so we had to hit up the Orlando temple
• Flying in at midnight, not getting to our room until 2 am and starving! But our resort was all shut down and a good 2 miles from food. Luckily the front desk hooked us up with a local pizza joint who delivered pizza at 3:30 am - only to be the thickest pizza dough we have ever had
• THE HUMIDITY
• Our rental car - a red PT Cruiser. Matt felt like an old man!
• All the cheesy tourisms
• Almost getting talked into a timeshare program - yep suckers

BJ's Pizookie - manna from heaven

Tito's sweet ride

Matt trying to sleep

Me not letting him sleep :)

Our nightly entertainment at Bahama Breeze - we ate there or stopped in for a drink several times during our week

The beautiful Orlando temple