St. Lucia Part 2

This will be my last post about our awesome trip to St. Lucia.  Then I'll go back to blogging about the normal things....maybe.  I do have a few announcements to make tomorrow about some events in the future though! 

Our next adventure in St. Lucia was a guided tour of Soufriere!  At first we thought about taking a boat tour or driving ourselves. When we met with the manager of our villa he told us that the boat tour would pretty much be a boose cruise and that we wouldn't see many things inland that most people go down there to see.  He also told us that the roads to Soufriere are pretty hilly and scary for people just learning to drive on the other side of the road.  He suggested we do a private tour, hiring a driver for the entire day to show us the town.  We are so glad that we went with this option.  Our tour guide was so nice and showed us so many things along the way. 

We stopped a bunch of times along the way at different cities/fishing villiages to take pictures. This is St. Lucia's biggest city Castries.

Maragot Bay

Canaries

Then we came within view of the Pitons

We were getting close!

We stopped at the botanical gardens/diamond waterfall/mineral baths.

Then we went to a cocoa plantation (no pictures) and then to the best lunch of my life:

because this was our view.  Our hotel manager hooked us up with the best seats in the house!

After lunch we moved on to the sulfur springs and mud baths.

And finally we went snorkeling in between the two Pitons.

We were at the resort that Oprah stays at when she is on the island.  Oh only $1000/night.  We got to pretend like we were rich and famous for the day.  All the beaches are open to the public in St. Lucia which let us sneak in to all these expensive resorts and enjoy their views. 

The next day we actually went on a snorkel trips (in which no pictures were taken).  For the remainder of our trip, we relaxed and revisited some of our favorite spots from the trip.  On our last night, we went for a sunset cruise on a pirate ship (with an open bar...yes please).

with a steal drum band!

We had such a great time, met a lot of great people and may have gotten a little tipsy.

mini cannon

It was a fun way to spend our last night, and made us remember the night we got engaged...on another sunset cruise in Key West.

Man did I look like a hot mess when we got engaged hahaha. Don't mind our matching sweatshirts, the weather was not so great that day and these were the only warm things we had with us.  One of my biggest pet peeves is when we match, so this was not ok hahah.

All in all we loved our trip.  Whenever we get back from a trip like this, we talk about our next trip.  We both want to go to Europe before we start the next phase in our life (bambinos).  We are going to try and save up some money/vacation time from work and go within the next 2 or 3 years. I need to go to Italy, not want, NEED!  I am 50% Italian afterall....



St. Lucia First Half

Today was my first day back to work and boy was it depressing.  I just kept daydreaming about our trip....

We arrived on Saturday night to our villa!

We stayed in the one all the way on the right on the top floor. There were only 30 villas all together, and we loved that it wasn't overcrowded and cramped like a lot of the all inclusive resorts nearby.

This was the view from our villa. Gorgeous!

The first day we got there we were so tired because we were up at 2:45 that morning to catch our flight. We went to bed at 8pm and slept until 6am.  Since we were up so early, we decided to take advantage and explore the island.  We had a jeep rental included in our package, so the only thing left to do was let Matt try and drive on the wrong side of the road.  He actually did a great job though.

We headed up to Smuggler's Cove for some early morning snorkeling.

Since it was so early, there was nobody there with us, which was really nice. We went in the water for a bit, but there wasn't as much to explore as we thought there would be, so we headed to our next desination, Pigeon Island.

Pigeon Island from afar. They have WW2 ruins on the island, and pretty good hike to the top and gorgeous beaches at the bottom.

view from the top

Once we finished our hike, we moved to the beach.

 

My favorite part of the day was when this guy came up to us:

This little boat was "the fruit boat."  Basically a man that boats around to all the different beaches and sells fresh fruit. Yes please.  We got 2 mangos, 2 bananas and 2 cocunt water drinks.

BTW I wear a hat all the time on the beach b/c I'm pale as all get out and don't want to get skin cancer on my face.  Gotta love being Irish.

The next day we scheduled our zip lining tour that came with our "adventure package."  I've been so excited for this since we booked our trip!  And it did not dissapoint.

looking pretty sexy haha

ready to go!

We both had so much fun and would do it again if we had the chance. 

On our way home from zip lining we stopped at a few lookout points with our tour guide to take pictures. 

More trip to come tomorrow....



Vacation Food/Workouts

Now that I'm back from vacation, I'm trying to get back into better eating habits and working out.  Matt and I struggled through a 5 mile run today in the heat, and we both discussed the inevitability of us having to run on the treadmill/run after the sun goes down while training for our upcoming half marathon.  Right now I'm looking at a 12 week training program that I will start on the week of June 25th to be ready for the half on September 16th. 

Anyways, I figured since this is a food/fitness blog I would show you some of the amazing food we had in St. Lucia.

Breakfast: Not too much different than the US

I got a container of quick oats and would cook some of them up and mix with some yoplait greek yogurt that I came across. I also took packets of peanut butter with me, because I can't live without it.  And thank goodness I could have my coffee each morning out on our balcony

Lunches were pretty random. Some of the tours we went on included lunch, and other days we just ate what we could find around our villa which was usually an egg sandwich and some fruits and veggies. My all time favorite lunch was at Ladera:

Mahi Mahi salad. Not only was the food good, but the view was even better.

somehow we ended up with the best seat in the house.

another lunch out, a roasted veggie wrap with grilled pineapple

Dinner was really where we went all out exploring the local cuisine. We ate A LOT of fish which I loved. I didn't have meat at all for dinner while we were there. The fish was just too good.

Tuna at La Terrace. 

Matt got the pork ribs

Crab back appatizer at The Coal Pot

My favorite meal at The Coal Pot.  Tuna in a coconut curry sauce.  The sauce made the meal.

And one night we cooked for ourselves. We got some red snapper from the fish market and cooked it on the grill.

My favorite "local meal" was the Roti.  A roti is meat or vegetables with potato cooked in a yellow curry sauce wrapped up in a savory crepe. I had the veggie roti filled with mixed veggies, tofu and potatoes.

Really good but super filling. I could only eat half, so this is actually the other half that we had on the side when we cooked our snapper and some of matt's fries.

Snacks:

plantain chips

Cassava Cakes.  Our cab driver introduced us to these at a little shack on the side of the road. Casava is similar to sweet potato.  They make cakes out of them and eat them for breakfast.  The shop had a lot of different flavors. This one is apple cinnamon.  They taste exactly like baked oatmeal.

Drinks:

margarita

Bermuda triangle. Didn't know they were two for one until the woman gave me two drinks. Matt finished the second one for me.

Our favorite local beer similar to Corona.

we tried a ginger wine (in my hand) but it was disgusting, so we went down to the market and got some white wine instead.

coconut water (Matt's angry face is his attempt at taking an arm out picture haha)

Workouts:

Matt and I tried our best to workout every other day.  Even though we were staying active throughout the trip, it made us both feel a lot better to sweat it out in the mornings. However, we really had to get creative. We would bring the pads from the lounge chairs and put them on the deck for ab work. I would cycle through some abs work, lunges, squats, push ups, dips....and then I would go down on the beach and run down to the next hotel and back, about .4 miles.  Our beach didn't have too much room to run, but we managed.  I would go through this cycle 3 times and then would jump in the pool b/c it was so hot I was drenched in sweat.

Love this picture!

I also wrote down some workouts that I found on pinterest that were quick, but got your heart rate up for about 20 minutes. We figured, something is better than nothing.  The first day we got back from vacation, Matt and I went in the basement and did a good 40 minute strength workout. We both missed this the most while we were there, and we are both paying for it today with our sore muscles.

Some people think we are crazy for working out on vacation, but we love it.  There are worse things to be addicted to right?? lol