The Fabricius Family: February 2016

I know, I know. I am terrible at this whole blog thing. One of my New Years goals was to do my blog a little more. And to write in my journal. So hopefully this will help me a little bit haha I really have documented our lives since August 6th. Mostly in pictures. Really all we did was eat, work, sleep, Jackson Hole, eat, work, sleep, Thanksgiving, Christmas, eat, work, sleep. Maybe some working out in there somewhere too. So! With that being said, I am going to try hard to blog more. Especially since I have my iPad now. (Christmas gift) To start out, I'm going to write about the "8 day vacation" I got with my sweet, sweet valentine ❤️

As posted previously; Devin works for a wellness company here in good ol' Idaho Falls.
He's been helping on what we refer to as the "cruise project". A very long story short, he's been helping by putting 2,200 people in cabins on the Brilliance of the Seas. As a result of that, they asked him if he'd be able to go and help out during the cruise, and I got to tag along. So here's a time line of what happened :)

Saturday, February 6:
Saturday morning we got up and finished packing and headed down to Utah. We were flying out of Salt Lake on Sunday and decided we'd go down a night early to spend a little bit of time with our families. We drove right into Logan to watch Kendal, Jason and Lindsie play basketball games. After watching games we went to spend a couple hours with Devins family. We had dinner with them and even got to see Grandma Shirley. We went to bed pretty early since we needed to be up by 3 AM. YUCK. Also, a very Happy Birthday to my Grandma Karen :)

Sunday, February 7:
3AM came rather quickly. Devs dad and brother were kind enough to drive us to the airport so that we didn't have to leave our car there. I was super tired. If I don't get at least 7 hours of sleep...I can become quite the little grouch. Thankfully I wasn't too ornery on the plane ride ;)
We flew from Salt Lake to Denver then Denver to Tampa. When we left SLC, we had to have the plane de-iced. It was super cool! We had never seen that before. They had a regular looking truck with a long arm coming out of it. It had like a little pod station on it that the guy sitting in it controlled the truck from. He drove right over top of the airplane wing and started blowing air! It was kind of cool to see that.
The plane rides were pretty smooth. Our landing in Tampa was a little rocky, but we clearly lived to tell the story.. Haha we got to Tampa and took a taxi to the Westin Hotel. Oh my heavens are they scary drivers! We rode with two guys from Devin's work and they were polite enough to stick me up front with the taxi driver...... I could see the people ahead of us stopped...and the taxi driver would speed up. Then break real hard. It was almost as bad as Mexico. Almost.
We get to the hotel and our room wasn't quite ready yet. So we went to Jackson's Bistro right behind the hotel. Pretty cool name, huh?! Haha I thought so ;) we got the call that our room was done and we headed up! What an incredible view!! Since it was the super bowl, we had a little super bowl party while we stuffed envelopes. It was a pretty great night! Also...that hotel bed? Oh. My. Comfy.

Monday, February 8:
Devin had to be at the pier at 7 AM. So he got up early, again. 6 AM EST that's like 4 AM back at home. I couldn't go with him, so I was just going to take a taxi over to the pier at 10. I fell back asleep and at 8 Dev called to see if I could come at 9:15 to help out. So I met two other wives and we headed over to the pier. Of course Devin had my boarding pass...so getting in was a little more difficult than I would have liked..but I made it through security and found Devin in the crowd. Devs work handed out cute little beach bags to everyone who boarded the ship.

They were so cute! I was super excited when we both got one too. I helped hand out bags up until we boarded. When you go on a cruise you're required to do a safety drill. As a whole boat. Turns out, they were waiting on a couple of us. Oops! The rest of the evening went pretty smooth. We went under a giant bridge when leaving the port. Which was really cool. Later that evening we started to hit some pretty choppy areas. We had dinner at 8:30 in the Minstrels dining, and midway through dinner Dev got super sea sick. It wasn't just him either. The whole ship was getting sick and the front desk was handing out sea sick pills like candy...We ended up having dinner delivered. So we had a nice little steak dinner, in bed, at 9:45. It was pretty fun! Lots of people got sick the first 2 days at sea. Throwing up, not being able to walk, etc... So to bed we went!

a little dark, but the bridge is behind Devin.

Tuesday, February 9:
Not a whole lot happened on Tuesday. Devin was supposed to have meetings basically all day. He got up and showered and was down to his station at 8:30. His meeting started at nine and I had gone back to bed. In our stateroom, when the lights are off it is seriously pitch black. I heard the door open and Devin wasn't looking so hott...well he was running to the bathroom to throw up. It was so choppy on Tuesday that even the Royal Caribbean people were getting sick. To be honest, we slept probably 21 of the 24 hours that day. It was pretty rough. Not a whole lot to talk about. I would manage to get up for an hour to go get lunch & dinner on the 11th floor and bring it down to level 4 so we could eat in bed with out throwing up. But honestly, it was the roughest day. Everything else went pretty smoothly after that.

Wednesday, February 10:
Cozumel Mexíco! We got to port at 7 AM, and boy have I missed Mexico!! It was pretty chilly there. While we were waiting for our excursion to begin (8:15) we kind of just walked around for a little bit. Not a lot of the mercados were open, so Dev promised that after our excursion we could go shopping :) our excursion we chose consisted of snorkeling and a private beach with some beach toys. We got on a what they call a cataraman. A weird lookin' boat. It took us to our snorkeling place. Our captain, Juan, was a little strange. He drove the boat the entire time with his foot. Which I should have expected. It is Mexico after all :) our guide told us that it's the coldest that he could remember Cozumel being. A whopping 50 degrees. Brr! Still warmer than home though.

COZUMEL MEXICO

So I'm going to tell a little story first, background information you could call it. The last time that I was at a beach in Mexico was basically 3 years ago this day. We went to Troncones. I don't remember the exact day, and to be honest with you, I don't want to. Jason was swimming in the pool at the resort we were staying at. Everyone except for me and him, were upstairs making sandwiches. I was supposed to be watching him. You know those toys that you throw into the pool and you dive down to get them? He was playing with one and I was taking selfies on my iPod. I should have been paying attention. He threw the toy and it went farther than what he could touch, and he started to drown. I remember looking up, hearing him yell for help and seeing his head go under water. I jumped up and dove into the pool. Before my face hit the water, I heard my mom yell "Jessica get him!" I somehow found him. I don't know how I found him, but I did. He was flailing his arms which made it a little bit difficult to keep him above water. I had to use all the strength I had to throw him a couple of feet. He went back under water and I had to use that time to push off the bottom of the pool, get air, and go find him again to repeat the process. It felt like forever. All I could think was if he drowns, I'm never going to forgive myself. I finally got him to the edge of the pool and not even 1 second later, my dad was there. He pulled Jason out of the water, who was crying, and then pulled me out. I remember laying on that piece of cement crying. I was giving thanks to my Heavenly Father and crying.

So. Back to the original story. I had totally planned on snorkeling. I put my mask on, life jacket and little flippers and into the ocean I went. Remember when I said it was choppy? Well the waves were going over my head and it set me back. The only thing I could think of was that incident where my baby brother almost drowned. I had a complete anxiety attack. I was aware of what was happening and I was trying not to let it show. But of course, Devin could see right through it. He know what was happening and he was concerned. I tried convincing him that I could make it out to our little tour guide but my husband knows me best. He had one of the other tour guides take me back to the boat. He even came with me. I begged him to go have so fun and find a turtle or something but he insisted and staying on the boat with me. We sat on the edge and watched other people snorkel. It wasn't too disappointing though. We saw a sting ray swim underneath the boat!

After we "went snorkeling" they took us to a beach that had some bounce houses 20 feet off shore. It was still kind of cold so we didn't play in the water for too long. Devin went down the slide one time (losing one of our luggage keys in the process) and then we relaxed on the beach! It was so great!!

We finally got to go shopping too!! One of my favorite things about Mexico is the shopping! I love the mercados. Things are cute & cheap! We bought some ice cream. I got caramel and D got cherry. Fue increíble a hablar en español otra ves con la gente de Mexico. I almost forgot! I also had an authentic, straight from a random truck on the street, taco! Mmmm mmmm!!

Devin learned too that if you take one of the sea sick pills from the ship before the rocking began, he wouldn't get sick. We handed out some invitations and spent the rest of the night chillin'!

Thursday, February 11:

Grand Cayman! Yeehaw! We made it to the Grand Caymans! Okay, so those storms that I was talking about earlier made it so that we couldn’t “dock” at the normal location. So instead we went on the other side of the island to “dock”. Now when I say “dock”, I’m putting the quotation marks around it because its not really a “dock”. The boat doesn’t come to shore at all. In fact, at about 10:10 AM EST we boarded a little tender which took us to the shore. It was really pretty cool! From there we took a taxi to 7 MILE BEACH!! Oh my gosh. It’s one of the most gorgeous beaches in the world in my opinion. It’s so marvelous! We took a cab with another couple from Devs work and laid on the beach! We ate a $60 dinner on the beach and I FINALLY got my piña colada! Virgin of course :) So taxi’s in Grand Cayman are not as cheap. It was like $5.00 a person everywhere you went… when you go a lot of places..that’s not cheap! I got the cutest little glass turtle and Devin bought a wooden piece that was painted by someone there. It has the mask and a palm tree on it. It’s super cool and I can’t wait to find a place to hang it up! It did start to rain a little bit while we were on the beach. Also, It’s kind of weird, but roosters just like run the place. They just are roaming everywhere. I found one on the beach and like to think that we became acquaintances. Haha, JK I took like one photo with him and that was it. At about 3 oclock we went back to the ship. Carnival had a cruise ship there too. It was cool to see what we looked like..if that makes sense haha. We were one of the first groups back on the ship, and to be honest…it was quite nice! We just walked around the boat and relaxed. It was a great day to be out and about.

SEVEN MILE BEACH

Friday, February 12:

FREE DAY!! Devin had meetings all morning so I got to relax! I went up to the solarium and I was there with one other lady. IT. WAS. FABULOUS. I seriously sat in the hot tub, by myself, for an hour. It was awesome. We had a fitness expo to 2 PM. Everyone gathered together on the 12th deck and they had a friendly competition. You could do rowing, pull ups, push-ups, sit-ups, burpees and planking. One little girl planked for 14 minutes. Seriously, I watched her do the entire thing. It was incredible. After that we really didn’t have to work the rest of the trip. We were supposed to wake up at midnight to help tear down stickers and things, but a couple of guys got a little impatient and started at 10:30..so it was basically done when we got there at 12. Devin and I decided that since we were supposed to be up at midnight, we’d go to bed early and watch some movies. So we watched the Avengers and Just Go With It. I love both of those movies so I was totally ok with it.

Saturday, February 13:

Time to go home!! When leaving the cruise, you had a couple of options in regards to your luggage. You could both put it out by midnight that morning and sleep in a little while, or you could have taken your luggage with you. But you had to be to the theatre by 7:30. Devin and I chose the early option because we had one of the earlier flights. It was pretty smooth actually. We just walked right through customs. Didn’t have to be scanned or anything! It was a nice change compared to the airports. We got out fine then of course had to take one of them crazy taxis back to the airport. But I sat in the back this time.. ;) When we got to the airport we just went straight over to our terminal. Of course, I was wearing my jacket that caused me to have to be frisked…but whatever.. no big deal…… the flight was decent. They handed out this “cookie” called a ‘stroopwafel’. They are sooo good! I’m debating if I should order them from Amazon or not. The flight from Houston to SLC was a different story. We were overweight. It took like an extra 40 minutes to take off because we had to removed the extra weight first. When ever there is bad weather, the airport requires a “back up airport” and guess what one they picked for SLC?! Rock Springs, WY. Like really?! Why not Ogden? Or Logan? Because they had chosen Rock Springs, they put like an extra 100 gallons of fuel in the plane and that made us overweight. They got ahold of Ogden airport and was granted permission to use that as their backup airport, but then they had to take the time to take some of the fuel out of the plane. I was asleep this whole time and was very disappointment when I woke up and found out we were still in Houston. To make matters worse, it was like a 3 ½ hour flight. It was too long for me.. I was getting super antsy and was so excited when we landed. Devins family picked us up, we went to Pei Wei and then to my parents house for a little bit. We were really tired. Technically we’d been awake since 3:30 AM MST.. so we’d been awake for quite awhile. It was nice to finally just be back, at least to Cache Valley.

Sunday, February 14:

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!! I just have to say, that my Valentine is better than anyone elses. :) I’m just throwing that out there! We did laundry at grandma and grandpa’s because we were already there so we might as well save ourselves $8.00. We went to see my parents. Got to see my favorite niece and nephew, then ate with Devins family and came home! I am very blessed for the opportunity that we had to go on this cruise. We learned so much and had a lot of fun. It’s been a little weird being home. We feel like we’re still on a boat and will feel ourselves rocking as we try not to fall over… It was a great trip and I am so glad that I got to spend that many days off with my sweet valentine.

some pictures from throughout our trip :)