Serenity NOW!

The first week of our honeymoon took a nice, slow approach. So slow in fact, that I actually had enough time to explore every menu on a camera I owned for a year. Hey - don't knock it. What do you do in your spare time? Read books? Better yourself? Bah - fiddlesticks.

My results speak for themselves - Voila! This new feature I uncovered was by far the best way of catching the true feeling of the Maldives:

And We're Back....

I hope our noticeable absence from our blog has been a forgiveable one, as Matt and I finally decided to go ahead with that whole marriage thing! :) We've returned from our "Surf and Turf" Honeymoon (read: Maldives and Kenyan Safari) and we have so much to share!

First things first, we can't wait to share photos from wedding but alas we don't have these yet, so we'll have to go a little out of order...

The Maldives were absolutely beautiful! Our over-water bungalow was just wonderful, and I must admit a bathtub that you can feed fish from is a pretty cool feature! There was atleast one massive thunderstorm everyday (which left a nice little time were the only place to keep dry was the spa - thank YOU Mother Nature!). The water was warm and the snorkeling was phenomonal. Our only scare was Matt swimming with about a 2 foot clearance over a reef and looking down to see a Moray Eel staring up at him and getting curious! Of course, the first this Matt does is yell over to me "Whoa, Katie come quick and look at this huge eel!" and then secondly "oh wait, umm, actually keep your distance I think he is swimming towards me..."

Upon futher inspection from a few feet away I can confrim that not only was this eel huge, but yes it was swiming out from its little cave to get aggressive towards Matt - what happened to 'they are more afraid of you than you are of them'? Luckily he had a short attention span and we received no eel retribution. As with all vacations the pictures always do a better job than we can, so I'll leave you with our highlights from the Maldives!

Our fabulous over-water bungalow

This sign is great - don't consider your children to be "drown proof" - wow, some things get lost in translation.

The entire Honeymoon was a walking ad for the Kindle! Great wedding present!

Whooo! It only took 2 hours but we finally caught some fish! They turned into.....

...lunch the next day!

I think this picture looks like it's raining fish!

Scuba Matt...

Great underwater shot courtesy of Matt. There are some "Nemos" hiding in there.

A dolphin comes to say hello.

Oh my god, it's like my screen saver came to life!

An incredible sunset on our last evening.

Matt planned for a dinner for two on our private deck for the last night - what a keeper!

I Just Flew 14,374km, and Boy Are My Arms Tired

And my face, and my legs, and my back, and I'm stuffed up, and...woa, I need to lie down. Here's how NOT to de-stress after a big wedding:

1. Drive from Washington DC to Philadelphia PA
2. Drop off wedding gifts that are too heavy for our arms to carry
3. Take the train to New York's Penn Station
4. Sit in rush hour NYC traffic to JFK Airport
5. Fly to Dubai
6. Rush from Dubai Airport, back to the apartment, find out that your cleaning lady took all of the carefully packed "honeymoon bags", and since she was bored (we were gone), took everything out of the bags and put it back in our closets, then puts the bags themselves in storage (thanks, Evelyn - good initiative on that one!)
7. Go back to the airport, tell immigration that, "Yes, I know I was just here, I'm getting back on a plane", and fly to the Maldives
8. Take a speedboat ride to the hotel.

Yup - so please pardon us for not getting on the blog posting all that quick. Here's how we started out (notice the "go get 'em" attitude!): And here's what that same Katie looked like on Minute One of the honeymoon:

But believe me, I was no better! I barely made it to the villa, and had to crawl back under a tree somewhere to beat out the jet lag: So, don't worry - we've got a backlog of pictures, and yes, even some from the wedding! We'll get all that out to you in our spare time, as long as we don't get eaten by sharks or our house on stilts doesn't get washed away (that's another post!).

Success - Technology Wins!

In an outfit that looks straight out of Vogue, and sporting hardware straight out of Wired, Katie is looking ravishing while devouring the third book in Twilight series under the Maldivian sun. Designers of Amazon's Kindle should note that of all the gadgets I've given to Katie, this is only one of two that she hasn't thrown against a wall in disgust (the iPhone is the other). Now if they could just make a laptop shaped like that hat...