Project Life Tuesday – One&Only Ocean Club Bahamas Edition

Welcome to Project Life Tuesday 2013 If you are new to The Mom Creative, welcome. I hope you will stay awhile. I’m Jessica – wife to Matthew, mom to Elias, a silly and spirited five-year-old, and Adeline, a spunky two-year-old. I’m also a marketing professional, savvy deal finder, photo lover and memory keeper trying to juggle it all.

Each Tuesday, I share my most recent spread as well as host a linky for readers to link up their pictures/layouts. Some links are affiliate links.

YEOW! Matthew and I are in the Bahamas right now celebrating his 40th birthday. We come home tomorrow.

So instead of photos in pages, I have photos in paradise.

We are staying at the One&Only Ocean Club in the Bahamas. For our honeymoon in 2004 we stayed at the One&Only Palmilla in Cabo and have always dreamed of vising another one of these incredibly magical resorts. Matthew and I had talked about going next year, but I decided to surprise him for his 40th birthday and book the trip a little early.

The Ocean Club is on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. The man who owned the resort in the 60s imported statues from Europe.

He also imported a 13th century Augustinian Cloister, which was shipped in pieces from France.

Needless to say, the grounds are incredibly beautiful.

The Ocean Club also owns Atlantis, so we spent a half-day there.

They have a huge indoor aquarium that was fun to walk through.

We also enjoyed the lazy river and water slides, but didn’t get any pictures!

Yesterday we went on a day trip to the Exuma Islands with Powerboat Adventures. It was an hour boat ride each way, and definitely worth it.

We first stopped on an island covered in Iguanas.

The iguanas were friendly enough that you could feed grapes to them (on a stick).

 

Ladies with pink or red toenail polish had to bury their toes in the sand though because the iguanas would think they were grapes!

Then we headed to another island where we spent most of the day. If you go on this excursion, bring a book because there is definite downtime for relaxing.

While on the island, we got to feed massive wild sting rays.

We knelt in the water in a straight line and had raw fish inbetween our fingers (as you can see in the picture below). We had to then set our hands on the floor of the water, and the rays came right up to us to eat the fish. It was SO amazing.

We also got to witness a shark feeding. About 10-15 sharks came right up to shore to be fed and it was INCREDIBLE.

We saw nurse sharks, reef sharks and lemon sharks. The food was attached to rope and the sharks would come up to eat it.

They got pretty aggressive trying to get the food. (Check out this Instagram video Matthew posted of the feeding.)

We also had a massive lunch and saw the making of the popular local conch salad. I’m not a seafood girl and did not try it, but it was neat to see.

The funniest part of the day was on the boatride back. The trip offered free alcohol, so some people were a bit tipsy. A man sat next to me who had clearly had one to many rum punches. About 10 minutes into the boat ride, he fell asleep… on my shoulder.

I could not stop laughing. Eventually, we got him to wake up, but OH MY WORD.

Yesterday was Matthew’s actual birthday, and when we got back to our hotel room, we were surprised that the One&Only staff had decorated the whole room. So thoughtful.

Today we are going to go in Nassau to do some sightseeing and shopping at the Straw Market.

For you Project Lifers, I hope you’ll link up below! I’ll be back to my normal layouts next week. Also, be sure to hop over to Becky Higgins’ new beautiful website. Also, check out the free online class (Creative Live) featuring Becky starting tomorrow.

 

Your turn to link up! Also, just a friendly reminder to please remember to link back to The Mom Creative in your posts. Thank you!