Free vodka tonic in the Sky Club before our flight from JFK. We actually got to the airport early on purpose, just to take advantage of this. 🙂

David cashed in some points for us to upgrade our seats to First Class. We are so spoiled now, I’m not sure we can fly coach anymore. 😉 HAHA

The Bride and Groom, with Garrett (16) and Owen (10)

Matt & Jennifer

Dave & Shari

Us 🙂 (Broke out the linen shirts for this trip!)

On board our flight (a Cessna 402) with a cheers to the beginning of a super fun trip! Matt always gets to sit in the front because he weighs the most, so we always tease him about not taking the controls and making us crash.

The Bride and Groom on the ferry ride from Treasure Cay to Green Turtle Cay. It’s about a 15-minute boat ride that both tourists and locals have to use to get around between the two islands. We had the same boat captain as we had in 2010! Not much changes in this place…

After we got settled into the house (which I realize I don’t have any pictures of), our first destination was Miss Emily’s Blue Bee Bar. Miss Emily invented the famous rum punch that they call Goombay Smash…it’s seven different kinds of rum and a few different fruit juices. Very strong, but very delicious!

The whole group at Miss Emily’s!

They serve the Goombay Smash in rinsed out water and milk jugs by the GALLON and half gallon. We crushed a couple of gallons this first day. 🙂

Kalik is the Bahamian beer that everyone serves in the Bahamas and The Abacos. It’s not my most favorite beer ever, but it’s all most restaurants and bars have, so I force it down. 😉 This was on the way back to the house from town on our golf cart. That super blue water is on the Atlantic side of the islands, out into the open ocean. It’s the most beautiful colored water I’ve ever seen! There are very few cars on the island, and most people get around by golf cart. We rented four carts while we were there, so we could all go off in different directions to explore/drink/eat whenever we wanted.

This is the view from the back of our house. Our own private beach and dock. Dave rented a 22′ boat for the week, so that is how we island hopped and explored most days during the day. Pretty perfect view!

This is the view from the dock on the other side of our house. This side is the “inside” of Green Turtle, where the Green Turtle Club and a lot of the other docks and restaurants are. It’s protected from the Sea of Abaco in here, so it’s almost always slick and calm.

Owen wading in the water on one of the islands we stopped on one afternoon.

Our first time on Munjack Cay, which is one of the bigger islands near Green Turtle, this big guy came up to the boat and swam around for a few minutes. He was probably close to 3 feet in diameter! We just thought he was passing by, but we later learned that this is where the boat tours come to feed the stingrays, and he must have been conditioned to know that the sound of a boat meant dinnertime! He was so gentle and beautiful, and surprisingly not scary, but he went on his merry way when he figured out we had nothing to offer him.

Sometimes we wouldn’t have a dock to tie up to on the islands we would stop on, and we would have to tie up on shore or anchor off the front of the boat. This time, it took all three of these guys to get the boat turned the right way! I took a hilarious video of them trying to wrangle the giant boat, but of course, I still can’t get videos to post on here, so you’ll have to imagine a Three Stooges-esque scene. 🙂

He’s in his happy place…on a boat in the Abacos with a Kalik and cigar. He totally deserved this break!

Sunset out the back of our house. Here you can see our boat tied up.

When you’re on Green Turtle, you have to go to Miss Emily’s and you have to go to Pineapple’s. This funky little bar and grill is right on the water, with a teeny little beach and a dock for those who arrive by boat. It has a saltwater pool and lots of picnic tables to hang out at. We thought their conch fritters were the very best on the island, and we tried them all, trust me. We went here twice and loved every second of it. Our super sweet bartender, Yvonne, took such great care of us and could pour a MIGHTY strong rum punch and an even stronger margarita.

This is Caroline, the dog that lives at Pineapple’s. The couple who owns the bar lives right next door, so she is technically their pet, but she is the mascot of the bar, as well. She is SO good at begging and her sad eyes and chin-in-your-lap will make you have no choice but to give her anything she ever wanted. I was missing Nelly tons at this point, so it was nice to have another dog around to love on.

Another “mascot” of Pineapple’s is this guy. I can’t remember his real name, but he told us he goes by “Fiddy,” like the rapper, 50 Cent. (HAHAHA!) He was basically there to make fresh conch salad for an exorbitant price for tourists, but I have to say, he was quite a character and he made a damn good conch salad! He told us on this day that he would come on Friday morning to take us all out fishing…so on Friday, we all go up and got ready to go out…and, he never showed up. We saw him on Saturday, and he made no mention of it! Island time at it’s finest! We decided he either got a better offer, totally forgot, or just didn’t feel like it. We ended up having a great day anyway, but we all chuckled at the fact that we actually believed he was going to show up at all.

The water next to the little table where Fiddy was making our conch salad was littered with discarded conch shells. He also kept his “stash” of live conch there, all tied together by drilling holes in their shells. To get one for us, he just pulled the rope up, chose one and untied it! So clever!

On one of the neighboring islands, someone has created a tourist attraction by making a home for some “wild” pigs. There isn’t any fresh water on the island, so they rely on people to bring it to them, and it’s stored in several large tubs that the pigs can drink from. People also bring lots of food to the island to feed the pigs…mostly vegetables and coconuts. We didn’t have any food, so they weren’t too interested in us, but another boatload of people was there and they got a little aggressive trying to get the food from them! I guess they are still a little wild!

The pigs seem to be doing ok on the island – there were lots of big daddies and several babies around!

Owen posing on the tire swing near the pigs. People have definitely made this a tourist destination!

Cute Jen on the rope swing…she said it was NOT a comfortable place to swing!

David took this of me on Fiddle Cay, which was the closest island to us. We went several days to hang out here, with our coolers packed with beers and picnic lunches. It was heavenly.    In front of me in the water is a massive sand bar that stretches out at least 100 yards and never gets more than hip deep. It’s a super nice way to enjoy the water without being scared of what might be swimming around you! This was taken with our GoPro camera that we got to bring on this trip. We really enjoyed using it, even though it was always hard to know what we were taking pictures of, since the camera has no screen on it. We ended up with several really pretty shots that we really liked.

My weird feet in the sand on Fiddle Cay. I won’t ever get over how beautiful the color of the water is in the Abacos.

The group hanging out in the water on the sand bar.

Liz and Jason decided to get married at The Bluff House, which is a hotel/resort and has several great restaurants and bars that are open to the public. They were married on Tuesday, so on Monday night we had a quick rehearsal on the beach where they were getting married and then headed to a nice dinner. We grabbed some shots of us all on the beach at sundown after the rehearsal.

Framer! I love this one of all of us together. Mostly, I love Shari’s happy laughing face.

This is probably one of my favorite pictures of us ever taken. All the heart eyes for this guy.

This was the sunset leaving the rehearsal dinner. I took about a million shots of the sunsets while we were there.

On the morning of the wedding, all the girls holed up in our room (because it was separated from the rest of the house somewhat, and had a working A/C!) and got ready for the wedding together. Liz found a lady to come do our hair and Jennifer did Liz’s makeup for her (let’s not talk about how I totally messed up her eye makeup by trying my hand at applying eyeliner…I can apply it to my eyes just fine – another person? Not so much.) Liz found this beautiful strand of pearls to weave through her hair and the hair stylist did such a great job getting it just right.

Since the Bluff House was about a 15 minute golf cart ride down dusty roads away from our house, Liz decided to borrow Jason’s sister’s room (she was staying at the hotel at the Bluff House) to get dressed. I know the photographer she hired got some beautiful shots of her dress with the ocean in the background (I took this one). Such a perfect backdrop for these kinds of shots!

This is where the ceremony took place…amazing! It was such a sweet and heartfelt ceremony. Jason was so, so excited to marry Liz and he was very emotional – it was so cute! And Liz’s smile couldn’t have been any bigger. I was so happy to be there to be a part of that moment for them.

All the guys got to wear fishing shirts and I found this dress that had the perfect sea and sky colors in it that is SO comfy to wear. The flower in my hair is the one that I wore in my hair at our reception, so I thought it was a perfect time to wear it again. 🙂

Another GoPro shot! That black thing in David’s hand is a remote that makes it easier to take pictures since the shutter button is in a weird place. (And, no, I’m not hiding my beer behind my back! Promise! 😉 )

Conch fritters and rum punch. Our diet for the whole ten days we were there. And, I’m pretty sure I gained ten pounds while we were there.

The bar at the Green Turtle Club is my happy place. It’s decorated with dollar bills that people write on and staple to the walls to leave their mark, along with burgees (small pennant flags) from yacht clubs around the world. The bartender, Debbie, is the jolliest, most hilarious character that we met on the island. We met her in 2010, and we were so glad to see she was still there this trip, too.

Caribbean colors in the town of New Plymouth.

Before we left on the trip, I got a text from Matt asking if I was going to be bringing my “good” camera on our trip. He had mentioned when we saw him at Thanksgiving that he had put money down on an engagement ring, but I wasn’t sure if he had actually bought it yet. I let him know that I would have my camera (duh!), and he told me that he was planning on popping the question to Jennifer while we were in the Abacos. I was so excited for them! He was hoping that we could come up with a plan so that I could capture the proposal, and I think we nailed it! We came up with the idea to tell Jen that we wanted to take “couple pictures” on this little isolated beach we had discovered, and we decided Matt & Jennifer and David & I would go one evening at dusk to take the pics. I told them they could pose first, and I stayed back as they walked toward the water, using the guise that I had my zoom lens on my camera, so I needed to be far away. They posed for a few shots, and then Matt took her hands, said what I can only imagine were super sweet words, and got down on one knee! She was super surprised and I was so happy to be able to capture the whole series of photos for them to have forever! David did great capturing the whole thing on video on his phone, too. We love them both so much, and they are just the most perfect couple, and we can’t wait to celebrate with them next Spring at their WEDDING!

After the proposal, we went back to meet up with the Sierks and Liz & Jason for a celebratory drink and Jennifer was able to FaceTime with her family to let them know they were engaged. 🙂

The next day, we went out with Liz, Jason & the boys on a snorkeling tour. Our guide, Brendel, has been doing snorkeling and scuba diving tours in the Bahamas for 30+ years and it was such a fun afternoon. We went out to the Atlantic side of the island to a reef and got to see lots of neat fish…including TWO SHARKS! One was a black tip and one was a bull shark, and we snorkled even though they were there. We were very trusting that Brendel wouldn’t let us get in the water if we were in danger. I was so distracted by the sharks, that I was not really paying attention to anything other than where they were, so I got out of the water after about 20 minutes, but the rest of the crew stayed in for about twice that long.

After snorkeling, we went to Munjack Cay to have lunch. Brendel’s guys put together a delicious meal of spiny lobsters and salad and we chowed down. But before lunch, right when we got to the island, we got to hand feed the sting rays! These are the same rays we saw on our fist visit to this island, and they are so docile. We had such fun feeding them by hand and by holding pieces of fish between our toes. I think this was probably my favorite part of the trip!

Our group with Brendel, in his speedo! 🙂

Us on the snorkeling boat. Blue on blue on blue!

Green Turtle sunset from Sundowners