Sharm El Sheikh ~ Diving Wrap Up

Good morning! This post is the sixth in a series of posts about our incredible trip to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in 2012! To start over at the beginning, click here!

Camel ride on the beach (as seen from our dive boat) - such a quintessential Egypt photo!

Last time we were heading for the third and final dive of the day, being escorted by a school of dolphins! (Yes, that does sound like a fairy tale, but I promise it happened - we have video evidence!) The journal entries pick up at that point in the story, so without further ado:

Tuesday 3 July 2012

9:27

When we reached the Naama Bay marina, we left with Chris, who walks every night from the marina to his hotel, and we hit the Starbucks! We picked up our Sharm el Sheikh mug - the MOST expensive mug we've ever purchased, ringing up at a whopping 125 £. E. ($24!!!)

Last night we met a cute couple from Hungary while we were attempting to use the Internet in the lobby. They are very friendly, and although I do not remember their names, we may be spending our off day with them tomorrow.

18:31

Today was our last day of diving, and we finished our trip on the Shorouk again (really a very nice boat captained by a man named Nasser) with Roger and Ryan as our guides. No one was taking courses on our boat today, so all of the dives were pleasure dives.

Ryan briefing us on Gordon Reef

We were back in Tiran, and our first dive of the morning was on Gordon Reef. We jumped in the second group with Ryan as our guide. Unfortunately for us, the first group jumped right over a group of eagle rays that stayed with them for about ten minutes. Even though we didn't see that, we still had a lovely dive. There were tons of anthias again, parrotfish chomping on coral, and loads of blue-green, red-toothed trigger fish. Over one section of reef, I saw one of those things that look like muppet lips that close when you wave your hand over them like a clam...I'm not sure what they're called, but they're super cool, and this one was huge! There was a wreck on Gordon Reef in 1981 that dropped a bunch of barrels of tar. They are mostly empty, but a few of them still leak from time to time. It's interesting to look inside the barrels to see what's taken up residence inside them. At the end of the dive, we were over a beautiful coral garden. We saw a crocodile fish resting under a large table coral, and Austin spotted a black-tipped grouper tucked up under a little outcropping.

trigger fish, crocodile fish, "muppet lips"

There was a gentleman who lives in Switzerland whose name is Stephan on the boat today, and he helped us find the names of most of these fishes in his fish book. I really want a fish book, but I think I'm going to order one off the Internet which should be considerably cheaper. We found out later in the day that he lives between Lausanne and Geneva.

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Our second dive, and our last dive of this trip, was on Woodhouse Reef (we were hoping to get to the north side of Jackson Reef where the hammerheads have been spotted recently, but conditions weren't favorable). However, Woodhouse was a GREAT last dive. For this dive, we jumped as one big group. It was full drift, so we didn't have to fin hardly at all, and about ten minutes into the dive a huge green sea turtle swam right through the middle of our group! We also saw several of the baby spotted rays. Chris, who has been with us for all five dive days, took a picture of us underwater together, and he's promised to e-mail it to us!

Underwater family picture ;) - courtesy of our new friend Chris!

After that dive we packed up our crates, and basically lazed around the boat for the rest of the day. Austin's back was really hurting, so while everyone else was on their third dive I gave him a short massage.

21:00

When we got back to Naama Bay, Chris made a point to say goodbye to us before he walked to his hotel to meet his daughter.

We checked out and packed up our equipment at the center, then hopped our transfer back to the hotel. We were very satisfied with our Emperor Divers experience, and happy to be done with our first five-day dive trip ever! We're tired, but we had a good time, and we feel more and more comfortable every time we dive! We're also very pleased with how our equipment performed! Everything works like a charm. My BCD is a little smidge big, but it does the job.

23:01

Dinner was just like normal. We had ice cream for the second night in a row!

After dinner we came back to the room and hung up all of our scuba equipment. Now everything will (hopefully) be clean and dry to pack for our flight home.

A view of our hotel from the dive boat!

Entertainment started around 21:00. It was pretty lame. They had a dude that ate fire and laid on broken glass and balanced on the sharp end of swords and stuff. Then at the end they tried to get everyone to dance, and it just ended up being really awkward. The guy with the microphone said "Yo, yo, yo, yo!" and "Sexy!" a lot. Not as a part of a sentence, just "Sexy!"

The "Animation Team" was also plugging a big beach party down at the Melia Sharm, so we walked all the way down there only to discover that it cost $12/person to buy a ticket to the beach party (something the animation folks had forgotten to mention). More lameness.

That's it for the dive logs! The rest of the story is pretty much a polar opposite from diving, but still pretty exciting! You won't want to miss it!

His,

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!

Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt ~ Tiran & Dolphins

Good morning! This post is the fifth in a series of posts about our incredible trip to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in 2012! To start over at the beginning, click here!

Part four ended with us learning about the Thistlegorm wreck. Although we didn't get to dive there on this trip to Sharm, the rest of our diving adventures were pretty exciting, so let's get back to them!

My journal entries pick up again the next morning!

Sunday 1 July 2012

8:54

It's a good thing we were looking forward to showers and dinner, because that was really all we did last night before going to bed! :) We were in bed "watching TV" by 19:45!

This morning was the same pattern: up at 6:30, packed and ready for the day, breakfast by 7:00, lunches picked up and waiting for the bus by 7:30.

The huge school of silver fish yesterday were definitely snappers, and the brightly colored, stripey fish are trigger fish. I think I've been getting those confused with parrotfish, although we have seen some parrotfish, too.

Today we're on a boat called the Empress Shorouk. According to our guide, Kirstie again today, the boat is named after the captain's daughter Shorouk.

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We're going to Tiran today, and it's about an hour and a half boat ride to get there. From our first day of diving we've been in the same group with four British folks. Three of them are traveling together: Mick, John & Michelle. John & Michelle are married, and Mick seems to be their long-time friend. Mick's wife passed away two years ago. He and Austin had a nice long talk one day, and "swapped stories." The other British gentleman is called Chris.

13:45

Everybody's eating lunch and resting now. We've had our two morning dives in Tiran.

The first dive was on Gordon Reef. There are four pinnacle reefs in Tiran named after the four original British cartographers who first mapped the area. Gordon Reef was supposed to be a semi-drift dive, but it ended up being a moored dive for us because I went through my air so quickly. We did see a huge eagle ray, a manta ray, and lots of brightly colored wrasses. Along with butterfly fish and the smaller angel fish. While we were doing our safety stop, we saw more of the small white fish with three vertical dark gray stripes (sergeant fish), and some beautiful turquoise-colored fish with very frilly fins and tails. We finished our ascent and came up, both of us over 60 bar. We were both pretty frustrated at such a short dive (only 34 minutes), so we ordered 15 liter tanks for tomorrow's dives.

eagle ray, fairy wrasse, clown fish

After a nice surface interval we steamed up to Jackson Reef. On our way there were a few dolphins riding our wake - maybe four or five. We hopped in over Jackson and made our descent. It was another beautiful coral wall and there were huge schools of the fish that look like goldfish and among them were some more purple/orange fish. Again lots of the wrasses. The current was very strong, and we ended up flipping around at one point and letting it drift us along the wall. During the drift we saw one of those long, skinny silver fish with a pointy nose (I've got to find out what those are called, too) and a brilliant green anemone with clown fish darting in and out of it. The current was REALLY strong, and we had to fight against it to get back to the mooring line. We were still the first ones up, but only by about three minutes, and or air consumption was about equal (however, to be fair, Austin did push me for a little way to conserve my air, and he had about 4 bar more than I did when we came out).

Kirstie briefing us on Jackson Reef

John and Michelle were close behind us, and the rest of the crew not long after them. We decided to forego he third dive, another local dive on the way back to Naama Bay, and packed our kit back into our boxes. We will be on this same boat tomorrow to go back to Ras Mohammed. Hopefully we will have favorable currents, and we'll get longer dives with the larger tanks.

As we were steaming away from Tiran, the captain started sounding his horn and hollering that there were dolphins around. We went downstairs and ran to the sun deck in the bow. Directly in front of us on the right hand side was a mama dolphin with her little baby! They swam alongside us for 5-10 minutes, and after a bit the big daddy dolphin joined them! When they swam off, the captain announced that lunch was ready. In the time it took everyone to load their plates there was a whole school of dolphins congregating out in front of us. We got up to them and counted between 15 and 20. Some off the port side, five or six off the bow and about eleven behind! It was pretty incredible!

Mama dolphin with her baby!

Now we're lazily motoring towards the local dive site Kirstie has chosen for the final dive of the day, and Austin and I are planning for a nice, long nap while the others dive (Austin has already started his ;D).

17:34

The fishes that look like goldfish are called anthias. The purpley ones that school with them are actually anthias, too! Crazy!

Well, there you have it! Four of our five diving days are behind us! Still to come: sharks, camels, and bedouins, oh my! Be sure to come back for the rest of the story!

His,

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!

Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt ~ Snorkeling, Reading, & Wreck Dives

Hello! You have arrived on the fourth in a series of posts about our incredible trip to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in 2012! To start over at the beginning, click here!

The third post covered our first and second days' dives, and boy, were they pretty epic! Our very first dive, the one that started it all, was in Cozumel, Mexico. Then we got our Open Water PADI Certification during a trip to Croatia, and our Advanced Open Water PADI Certification in Palma Mallorca! We had purchased our own "kit" (complete sets of diving gear) in preparation for this trip to Sharm! We definitely love to dive!

Monday 2 July 2012
9:12

We didn't end up napping through the whole third dive :) the water was just too inviting, so we hopped in with snorkels and took a little swim around for about 15 minutes. There were a lot of fishes even though the visibility wasn't great. Right next to the boat there was a big school of fusiliers, Suez, I think, because they had the dark stripe on their backs. There was a nice shallow coral reef nearby and we saw some clown fish and more of those frilly turquoise fish. At one point a diver on a scooter and his buddy were right below us. They got some clown fish to swim up out of their anemone and Austin and another snorkeler from our group did surface dives down to get a better look. The diver gave the other guy a breath from his tank!

Suez Fusiliersimage credit

It was Mick, Michelle, and John's last day diving, so we had a beer with them back at the center. Thy had taken some neat pictures, so we gave them one of Austin's business cards. Michelle said they would hit us up for future dive trips, too!

We said our goodbyes and hopped onto our respective transfers.

We got back to the hotel earlier than we have all week, but still not early enough for ice cream :( So we took nice long showers and enjoyed some quality time in the room before dinner. Austin was really tired and not very hungry, but he accompanied me to dinner anyway (he's so sweet)! After dinner I did some laundry and we turned on the tv. Austin fell asleep around 20:30 after watching the end of "Deep Blue Sea" (for the record, a really bad movie to watch while on diving holiday!).

I stayed up until about 23:00 finishing my book Asenath - a fictional account of Joseph's wife's life (I figured it was an appropriate read while on vacation in Egypt).

I was wide awake at about 5:10 this morning but fought valiantly to go back to sleep until about 6:15 when I gave up and started getting ready. In spite of my early rise, we did end up getting to breakfast a little behind schedule. They also forgot to make us lunches today. Thankfully we have a decent amount of leftovers from yesterday.
We're back on the Empress Shorouk today with 12 other divers 2 guides from {Emperor Linky}Emperor and a private guide who is with some underwater photographers (part of the 14). There's a guy on the boat today who looks really familiar, but I can't place him. Chris is still with us today, and probably will be tomorrow as well.

We're kitted up and ready to go with 15 liter tanks for this first dive, and we're en route to Ras Mohammed.

13:21

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Our first dive of the day was a drift from Eel Garden to Shark Observatory. We jumped with the second group, which was the two of us with an instructor called Brian. He was leading two AOWD students, so he pretty much left us to ourselves. We were both on 15 liter tanks, and we ended up with a 46 minute dive. We went to about 30 meters right away and initially we were over a sandy sloping bottom full of garden eels on the way back up to where we leveled up (about 20m), we saw a big stone fish. Pretty soon we came to a reef wall, and there were loads of anthias and butterfly fish and unicorn fish and some big parrotfish. I love how they sometimes swim on their sides!

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There were also some smallish schools of medium-sized fish that were half yellow on top and half purple on the bottom, Chris said he thinks they're goat fish, about ten or twelve of them were schooled together and they would dart in and out of the groups of anthias! Thy was pretty cool to watch. Additionally, there were several green anemones with couples of clown fish on them. Austin is the clown fish whisperer apparently because he would put his face right up next to the anemone and the clown fishes would practically bump into his mask swimming towards his eyes. He pulled me over to have a try, but they don't seem to like me as much as they like him.

Who knew I was married to the clown fish whisperer?
image credit

We had an hour-long surface interval and Kirstie briefed us on Shark & Yolanda take 2. This time I was on a 15-liter tank and Austin was on a 12-liter. We started out the dive in Brian's group again. We jumped on Shark, went with the current around the front, spent some time in the saddle, came around the back of Yolanda and dropped in over the wreck. We were able to really explore the bathroom fixtures this time which was cool! There was a really big stonefish and a moray poking his head out of his hole that I saw on the way to the wreck, but no one was close enough for me to point them out.

On the front of Yolanda we saw a huge moray out feeding, and Ryan and the students went up a little ahead of us and we joined up with Kirstie's group. We went through a small cave, and came out around 5m. It was the first dive that I wasn't the one making us come up -- my longest dive ever at 52 minutes -- and I came out of the water with 72 bars!

We opted out of the third dive again, but right now the group is doing a local dive called Paradise.

15:47

They did see a small white-tipped reef shark, but I don't really feel like we missed that much ;) Another diver, Kevin, who skipped the third dive as well, regaled us with stories of the Thistlegorm - an amazing wreck nearby. If we don't do it this week, it's definitely on my bucket list. They say it's one of the best wreck dives in the world.

image credit

Next time we wrap up our diving days, and after that we go from wet to DRY!!! Be sure to check back!

His,

Click here to read part 5!

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!

Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt ~ Deep Blue Adventures

Hello again! You've landed on the third post in a series about our 2012 trip to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt! To start back at the beginning, click here!

At the end of the second post, we had caught the dive company's shuttle to our first day of diving! The reason we had come to Sharm El Sheikh at all was to go SCUBA diving in the Red Sea. A gentleman that we met at Disneyland Paris had told us that one of the most amazing places to dive in the world was Sharm El Sheikh, and from that point Austin had been doing a ton of research about it and had "liked" Emperor Divers on Facebook.

Then, one day while surfing Facebook, Austin saw that they were having a buy one get one free dive trip sale, which is an incredible deal! Without much hesitation, he booked a five-day, ten-dive package (and thus got one free), so we built our vacation around diving with Emperor!

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Saturday 30 June 2012

10:03

Our first day of diving went fairly well. We were on the boat called the Delphinus, and our guides were Elise and Saad with Jonathan teaching an AOWD class.

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We did what they call "local" dives. Our first dive site was called Ras Katy (which is so cool!). I went through my air really fast and that dive was only about 35 minutes for us. The boat was doing three dives, but our package only covered two (the third would have been an extra 20€ per person), so we skipped the second dive which was on a site called Temple and snorkeled instead.

There was a Swedish family on the boat whose six-year-old came along for the ride. His parents took turns watching him and alternated so they both got to dive throughout the day. The mother, Susanna, and the little boy, Kasper, were on the boat while we were as well as a family from the Netherlands. We snorkeled for about 30 minutes and ate our sack lunches that the hotel had packed for us.

When the rest of the crew came in, they ate their lunch and we waited while they completed their surface interval. Then we moved on to our final dive site of the day, Ras Umm Sid. R.U.S. was a gentle drift dive and we saw some really fun fish against a coral reef wall. Lion fish, angel fish, zebra fish, sergeant fish, parrot fish, the huge schools of these tiny little silvery/turquoise fish and lots of fish that look like gold fish. Austin also saw a big Moray eel and a huge manta ray. Air consumption went much better that time, and my dive was exactly 45 minutes.

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Following that third and final dive, we packed up our gear into the crates provided by Emperor and labeled with our names while the boat chugged back to Naama Bay.

Since we were to be diving on the same boat, the Delphinus, the next day, all of our gear remained on board and we just took the small backpack back to the center with us. Back at the dive center we waited for about half an hour for the transfers to start back to the hotels.

On the dock in Naama Bay!

Susanna was an underwater photographer, and in the bus on the way back she mentioned that they may have gotten some good pictures of us! She gave us her husband's business card so that we could get in touch via e-mail. I'm really excited to see how they turned out!

We got a new key when we reached reception, requested a lunch box for the next day and tried to explain that we wanted more food. The man at reception recommended that we speak to guest relations, and the petite, blonde Russian woman who worked in guest relations told us that we needed to speak with the head of food and beverage, but he wasn't in yet.

16:17

At that point, we went back to the room, Austin showered and we went back to the restaurant for dinner. After dinner we met with the head of F&B and he was incredibly accommodating. He basically let us special order whatever we wanted and arranged to meet with us every evening after dinner to make sure the lunches were sufficient! Pretty amazing! With that sorted, we retired to our room (by way of the bar where we watched the bar tender make a fake beer for a little girl by creatively mixing several different sodas together). I showered and we washed out our salty swimming clothes and we went to bed around 21:00.

Our comfortable room!

Saturday morning, June 30th, we were up, packed and ready to go, and eating breakfast by 7:00! We refilled waters, grabbed our sack lunches (which one of the kitchen workers, Mohammed, proudly told us he had made personally at 6:00 :D) and waited for the bus to pick us up in front of the hotel.

While we were waiting, two other similar buses came to retrieve other people from our hotel. The first was obviously not going diving, and when I asked the driver of the second if we were on his list, he said, "I have one Russian, ma'am. You are English."

We had a pretty good chuckle over that, at which point I began exercising my Russian vocabulary to Austin. Many of the guards were apparently on break at the same time, and one of them came over and greeted us in Russian. Eventually we got around to the point that we are from Germany*. Obviously, the only topic of conversation to have with a German is EuroCup football. Around that point, the Emperor bus arrived and we were on our way back to the Dive center.

Being our second day, we knew the drill and checked in with our boat crew. We were on the Delphinus again but our guides had switched to Kirstie, and Jonathan had a couple of AOWD details to finish up, but he kind of doubled as the second guide.

Kirstie and another diver preparing to enter the water!

Our first dive of the day was on a site called Ras Burg. It was a full drift dive with a fairly swift current. We popped into the water, our group was led by Kirstie and we went in first. We made our descent (no ear problems at all! Praise the Lord!) and the very first thing we saw was a huge manta ray - like he was our welcoming committee :) We saw a lot more of those tiny silver fish in the big schools (which I did learn the name of today and then promptly forgot again), and some large parrot fish. The dive was next to a coral wall that dropped down 800 meters! There were also some bat fish, but I didn't see them.

lion fish, angel fish, zebra fish, sergeant fish, parrot fish, fusiliers, anthias, moray eel, manta ray
(from top to bottom, left to right)

We managed a 41 minute dive despite me sucking down air like someone three times my size, but we were the first divers back to the boat. We switched our kit while the deck was empty and headed upstairs to await the rest of the group. They came in and we had a significant surface interval (close to two hours). Lots of chatting and napping in the sunshine. Austin and I had lunch part one. About an hour into the interval the boat crew served everyone else their lunch, we napped a little more and them we got briefed on the second dive.

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Our second and final dive of the day was on a site called Shark & Yolanda. We were with Jonathan's group for that dive, and jumped in second. The current was considerable, but we tucked in tight next to the reef wall and dropped down with the Shark reef on our right side. We descended into a HUGE school of medium-sized silver fish (snappers I think) and made our way along the reef wall at about 15m depth. We saw a lot of butterfly fish and the fish that look like goldfish and one big moray eel on that wall. When we got to the saddle, Jonathan tried to fin around and up it, but the current was too strong. After a couple of minutes, he turned us around and we headed to the back side of Shark which was a fairly shallow (about 8m) coral garden. We saw a TON of unicorn fish an a couple of big stone fish. When we got around the far side of Yolanda we met up with the first group an saw a bit of the wreck for which the reef is named. We didn't get to see very much of it before we were being led around the front of Yolanda reef. Another big school of snappers, lots of butterfly fish and our second big moray eel, and by that time I was out of air. I go through air considerably more quickly than Austin does, and that really frustrates him because it shortens his dives even though he isn't out of air.

butterfly fish, stone fish, snappers, unicorn fish

Now we're headed back to the Naama Bay Marina. Tomorrow we're going to be diving Tiran. Looking forward to showers and dinner :)

17:23

They're fusiliers! The ones we've seen have been the Lunar fusiliers (silver with the blue/turquoise sheen) the Suez fusiliers have a darker blue stripe between their dorsal fin and their tail. Interesting fact about the fusiliers: they always point into the current!

I hope you enjoyed this installment in the Sharm El Sheikh series! I'd love to hear what you like, what you don't like, what you'd like to see more of, and what you're seeing too much of in these posts! Please let me know in the comments!

His,

*NOTE: At this time, we were living in Germany. It was also not a super-safe time to be an American in Egypt (the week after we were there an American man was kidnapped). The dive company listed us as "British" on all of their paperwork, and it was safer for us to be identified as either British or German in all public situations. Thankfully most people who do not speak English as their primary language don't immediately recognize the difference in accent between American English speakers and others.

Click here to read part 4!

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!

Cozumel Memories

I've been digging through the archives! So many pictures and memories! And I promised you travel adventures, so here it is...

The Trip That Started It All ~ Cozumel, Mexico ~ March 2009

(That may be a bit of an unfair title since our first international trip together (the one that planted the seeds of a passion for missions in our hearts) was a summer missions trip to France with a group from our college, but this was our first international trip as a married couple and included so many other firsts: Our first all-inclusive resort stay, our first SCUBA experience, etc. And it was on this trip when the adventure bug bit us both -- in a big way!)

In the late winter of early 2009, my frugal, brilliant husband was looking for a warm destination. The Iowa winter had been long and brutal, and we were dying to relax in the sunshine! He did quite a bit of research, and ended up finding a great deal on Orbitz where he was able to package our flights and our all-inclusive resort stay for a significant discount! (He's a keeper!)

When the day before our flight arrived, we packed up the car and headed to Des Moines. We spent the night before our early-morning flight at the Hampton Inn in Des Moines. We chose the Hampton because they had a continental breakfast, an airport shuttle, and we could park our car there until we got back! In my journal I recorded, "The desk manager was a card, so he and Austin got along great, and the room was very luxurious and comfortable - an excellent start to our long-awaited vacation."

The next morning, our requested 3:30am wake-up call did its job, and we caught the shuttle to the airport. Once there, we retrieved our boarding passes, checked our baggage, and sailed through security. Then we both slept most of the way to Atlanta.

image credits, clockwise starting at the top left: image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4, image 5

Once there we made our way to our next gate, then decided to do lunch at the airport version of TGIFridays. I love eating in airports because it is the most wonderful excuse to people watch! The Atlanta airport - reportedly the busiest airport in the world - boasts some pretty interesting characters, too.

It is always hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that there are literally billions of people all over the world living out their life stories simultaneously, and nowhere is that more apparent than in a bustling airport. I think too often we find ourselves operating in a “Truman Show” mentality, as though ours is the only play on the stage and everyone who passes through it are just extras and stage technicians - there for our benefit.

Image credits: image 1, image 2

Anyway - back to Atlanta - after lunch we trundled ourselves back to our gate and waited for our boarding call.

When we booked the trip, we did not realize we would be traveling during spring break season, and the throng of already-intoxicated college students at the Cancun gate made us pretty nervous. There did not seem to be any rowdy patrons at our gate, or on our plane as we boarded, so that put our minds at ease.

We were delayed by almost 30 minutes in Atlanta, so we hit the ground in Cozumel nearly simultaneously with two or three other large planes - which made for quite a mess in their small customs area. We snaked our way through a line that filled the large room and extended out the doors to the tarmac for nearly two hours.

Once we cleared customs and retrieved our check bags, we stood in another security line, which, once cleared, popped us out into the beautiful Mexican sunshine!

When we reached the resort, the Melia Cozumel, we entered the gorgeous lobby area that was 1000x more beautiful than the pictures on the Internet. We stepped into the lobby through automatic sliding doors and directly in front of us, through another pair of doors, we could see a gorgeous swimming pool - complete with royal blue lounge chairs, a swim-up bar and towel stand, and steps down to the breathtakingly beautiful beach - perfect white sand and startlingly clear turquoise water.

We tore ourselves away from the view long enough to check in. At the front desk we were welcomed with stemmed glasses of jamaica water, presented with room keys, maps, activities schedules, all-inclusive wrist bands, and cuisine/entertainment schedules. A quick and friendly porter whisked our luggage onto his cart and led the way to the elevators. In his broken English and our broken Spanish we learned that the elevators were new, and that he had been hauling toursits’ luggage up and down the Melia’s stairways for thirty seven years!

He was the first of many incredible and obliging staff members that we met during our stay! Throughout our time there, we had the same server for most dinners, and by day two he had our drink orders down so that we never had to ask, and the housekeeping staff kept our room immaculate - cleaning twice a day - and our mini-fridge stocked with complimentary sodas and bottles of water!

The Melia is located far enough away from downtown Cozumel so as not to be negatively affected by traffic noise or the late-night party scene, but close enough to be a cheap taxi ride in to enjoy any of the touristy attractions on offer.

The activities staff were all the perfect combination of engaging without being intrusive and overbearing if you just wanted to sunbathe instead of participate in whatever was going on! And there was always something going on! From beach volleyball tournaments to sand sculpture contests to dance lessons to water aerobics, there was something for everyone. And it was a true all-inclusive so whenever we got hungry or thirsty, there were several different choices available!

On the first day, on the shuttle from the airport, we met a group of students from Hampton University in Virginia who had chosen Cozumel and the Melia as their spring break destination. We spent most of our resort time, and a couple of days in town with them, and had a great time making memories (as you can see in the pictures below)!

Most of our days were spent either hanging around the beach and the resort or strolling and shopping in downtown Cozumel, but one thing both Austin and I had always wanted to do was SCUBA dive, and Cozumel has some of the most incredible diving in the world.

We asked at the hotel's activities desk, and they were able to set us up with a "Discovery SCUBA" trip which was fantastic! "Discovery SCUBA" is a dive for people who have either never been diving before or who have no diving certification. Since we met both of those criteria, it was perfect for us! (Although, if we were on this trip now, we would probably shop around more and book independent from the hotel because the concierge is usually not the best deal.)

Our dive trip was with Dive With Martin, and since neither of us had ever been diving before, we went with an instructor and only two other divers. The took us to the Palancar Reef, which we found out later is one of the most incredible reef dives in the world. The instructors gave us a short tutorial on the boat ride out, and then we hopped out of the boat and began our very first descent.

After a brief panic on my part at the top, we both were able to descend without too much trouble and commenced with one of the most magical experiences we had ever had! SCUBA is an incredible sport, and little did we know that this dive would be the beginning of something wonderful!

When we surfaced after our second dive - after seeing the beautiful reef and all of the life it housed, including some of the beautiful sea turtles Cozumel is famous for, we were both very clear about our opinion of the sport: We LOVED it! We would definitely be doing that again!

Our fun and funny dive guides got us back to the dock, and along the way regaled us with stories of other dives and divers in the area. It was a wonderful first SCUBA experience, and one that would set the tone for the rest of our diving adventures! We were thoroughly impressed with Dive With Martin, and would use them again if we were diving in Cozumel!

The group from Hampton University had to leave the day before we did, so we spent our final resort day, just the two of us, bumming around. I finished reading a book by the pool, we played some beach volleyball, I'm sure there were other activities that day, but the biggest thing I remember is that it was the only day that we did not apply sunscreen. At all.

I remember that because by the end of the day we were incredibly sunburned. (See the above collage, bottom right. We snapped that selfie in the Cozumel airport waiting for our departure flight.) We were both so sunburned that during our overnight layover at a hotel in Cincinnati, OH, we took advantage of the two double beds and each slept alone so as not to bump one another in the middle of the night!

But the pain was worth it to have some incredible color when we got home and went back to work! There's nothing like looking like a beach bum in the middle of early-spring Iowa!

So, that was our trip! Little did we know that before the year was out we would be starting on an adventure that would take us to a total of 15 countries by way of 38 different flights and have us sleeping in 58 different beds. But that's another story for another time!

Thanks for stopping by! Hope you have a great Monday!

His,

To see the original blog post from 2009, click here!

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!