Turks and Caicos Vacation

I’m back!  Did you miss me?  Or maybe you didn’t even notice that I hadn’t posted in more than a week… I’ll go with you missed me.  😉  My husband and I vacationed eight lovely days at the Seven Stars Resort in Turks & Caicos and we had a blast!  None of these photos have been adjusted, tweaked, modified, or “shopped” in any way.  That’s actually what it looks like down there.  Crazy huh?

Before leaving cold CT and heading to sunny Turks & Caicos, I researched the heck out of what we could do there because that’s what I do.  I plan, I research, and I plan some more, I make decisions, I change my mind, I research some more, I plan some more…  You get the idea I think.  In general, I think you visit a Caribbean island for its beaches (or because you really like pirates or rum) and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.  Since Turks & Caicos is known for their beautiful water, snorkeling is a popular attraction.  They are also the home of the world’s only conch farm.  After all that research, we ended up skipping the excursions entirely because we couldn’t pull ourselves away from the beach.  Can you blame us?

So what did we do for eight days?  Beach.  Pool.  Food.  Fancy tropical cocktails.  Yup, that about sums it up.  It was relaxation at its finest.  🙂

Saying that the beach was gorgeous is an understatement.  The sand is white and incredibly soft.  Amazing enough, it never got hot.  Not even when it was 89 degrees F and felt like 103 in the direct sunlight.  How did it do that?  The water… OMG… was crystal clear blue.  It’s the best beach in the world.  It has to be because I say so.  Plus, the Turks & Caicos’ tourism website actually says so.  (Like they would say anything else.)

By the way, you get sand in everything and everywhere.  I found some in our dryer after doing laundry when we got home.  Yes, I’m one of those people who must unpack and do laundry the moment I return home.  Being a neat freak isn’t easy.  😉

It snowed a bit back at home while we were away, but I didn’t care because snow was not in the forecast while I sat in paradise.  Cold… snow?  Nope, that wasn’t on my brain.  Instead, I was wondering when I was going to have my next pina colada, which by the way, was the best… ever.

This was our view from our room.  Part beach, part pool, part heaven.  Not too shabby, right?  I could definitely get used to that.

The room came with a complimentary Nespresso maker.  Have you heard of it?  It’s like a Kueurig, but instead of making individual cups of coffee, it makes individual cups of espresso.  We used it a LOT.  In fact, we might be buying one of those Nespresso makers we enjoyed it so much.  We started every morning with a cup of espresso on our balcony and had them as often as the fancy tickled us.  Good thing the pods were included with the room.  🙂

I love taking pictures of clouds and did so as I lounged on a beach chair.

Oh, and I read a book!  I mean I actually started it AND finished it.  I read Nora Robert’s Dark Witch.  I enjoyed it so much that I bought the second and third book in that series.  Just for the record, finishing books is not my strong suit, so that means it was really a good book.

This is quite possibly the coolest flower I’ve ever seen.  I’m not going to pretend I know what kind it is, but it was huge and super cool looking.

These little guys were a common sight.  When I first saw one I screamed a little inside me… or maybe it was out loud.  They like to dart out from under the bushes and skitter across the foot paths at very high speeds.  We sort of had a mutual understanding.  Don’t run into me and I will try not to step on you.

We named them Larry the Lizard.  Yes, they were all named Larry and yes, we name creatures starting with the letter of what they are.  It’s just one of those things that I started doing, and now my husband plays along too.

One little Larry even followed us into our room one night!  Of course I freaked out while my boo patiently captured him and released him into a bush far from our room.

Thankfully we had great weather.  It only rained on two days for a few hours in the afternoon. Both times we retreated to our balcony where we enjoyed room service for food and drinks.  That’s a frozen cosmopolitan.  Frozen?!  What a brilliant idea and I definitely need to make this version at home.  It might need to wait for the warmer weather to return though.  It seems like all I can think about right now is hot cocoa and soup.

The food at the resort was delicious.  I left with a number of recipe ideas that I can’t wait to try. The food blogger part of me never fully shut off while we were down there.  I’m okay with that.  🙂

My husband likes taking panorama pictures where you take lots of pictures and use fancy software to stitch them all together into a single picture.  This picture was actually made out of 44 pictures.  (The actual panorama is ginormous.)  There is no one around because it was early in the morning and my husband hates doing panoramas with people in them.  (Apparently they tend to move around and you end up with half people or the same person more than once in the panorama and that just looks silly.)  It’s smaller than my normal blog pictures here because the panorama was so wide.

We really had a blast and would love to return some day.  In fact, I wish I was back already, where it’s warm, where I have no (or very few) cares, and where calories don’t matter.

Instead,  I’m trying to stay warm in my over sized orange sweatshirt (which was my husband’s). I’ve already got a mental list of what needs to be done before Christmas and before Thanksgiving (holy cow that’s less than two weeks away!) and my brain is already fully back into non-vacation mode.

Plus, calories do matter because I feel like a stuffed sausage in my clothes.  In fact you might see some healthy recipes coming up on my blog, as I try to get back on track to eating better (and shedding those cursed vacation pounds).  I’ve got to hit the ground running with my holiday baking, so you’ll also see some fattening cookie recipes in the mix.  Confusing, I’m sure, but hopefully you get me.