The Ruder the Better: Vacation/Battery Recharge

Tim and I were fortunate to spend five nights in St. Lucia this past week. When we made the decision to move back home to Wisconsin we said that we needed to make a sunny vacation a priority every winter to help get us to spring. This winter has actually been extremely mild and spring like but it was still nice to take a few days to enjoy each other and sleep through the night. On our way down to St. Lucia we had an overnight layover in Miami but it worked out well because we were able to go out to dinner with Tim's cousin, Dan, who lives in Miami right now. We started out booking a bunch of excursions and activities for our trip and then we scaled back a bit so we could actually spend some time just relaxing. We spent our first full day doing a tour of the island by boat. We visited a volcano, sulphur mud bath, a gorgeous waterfall, we snorkeled under the Pitons (famous mountains in St. Lucia), had an awesome Creole lunch and then went to Marigot Bay and saw an area of the island where Pirates of the Caribbean II was filmed. On our second day we booked another boat out to a different snorkeling area. We saw a lot of fish that were different from the first area we snorkeled. We returned late and spent a few hours reading oceanside and body surfing in the huge waves on our beach. I actually finished four books while we were on vacation!! I couldn't believe it, it was so weird to be able to read for so long uninterrupted. On our third and fourth day we went to a more northern part of the island that had a calmer beach so we could do more water sports. We were finally able to try SUP (Stand Up Paddle) boards. I have wanted to try this for ages, it was just as much fun as I imagined, and a great workout. We'd like to purchase a board in the next few years, we have a ton of lakes around us where we could use it. We also spent time sailing a catamaran, jet-skiing, and just lounging in the ocean. It was so nice to be able to spend time with Tim and get some rest. We missed the kids dearly but they had a great time staying with Tim's parents. We got daily update emails from Tim's parents giving us the run down of each day. I don't know if we'll do this every year or not but the past year has been packed with so many crazy and exciting events that it was nice to slow down a bit and celebrate five years of marriage and doing so well with our three kids under two this year.