Adventures of a Wandering Thirtysomething

It’s been several months since we’ve posted, mostly because the only adventures we have been up to are working long hours and putting in equally long hours on our house. There’s nothing like behaving like a boring old person to make you resist posting about your boring, old person life. But thankfully, after months of anticipation and nearly two years of patience for our finances to stabilize following our big move and Matt’s long job search, we made our way back to our original adventure spot: Jamaica.

Four years ago we ventured to Negril  - about 2 hours west of Montego Bay - for our honeymoon and had an amazing time. Despite our love of the island and the people, we always swore we wouldn’t go back while we still had so many other places we wanted to travel to. Fast forward four years to our “must visit” list of vacation destinations several pages long, and we still decided to return to Jamaica. At the end of the day, we simply couldn’t beat the value of the accommodations, the food, the culture and the beauty that Jamaica has to offer.

This time, wanting to change it up a bit, we headed to Ocho Rios – about 2 hours east of Montego Bay. Ocho Rios is more touristy than Negril and often riddled by cruise ships (the bane of our beach travel existence), so we were a bit skeptical about how it would measure up to our last trip. But thankfully, our resort was well outside the touristy hotspots and had its own private inlet beach just a couple properties down from Ian Fleming’s house with absolutely no tourists, cruise ships or knickknack shops in sight.

Though most of our days were spent relaxing on the beach and getting waited on hand and foot, our adventurous spirit was alive and well and we hired a private driver to take us off the beaten path to the parts of Jamaica not typically seen by tourists. After traveling along winding roads for a couple hours, we stopped first at Frenchman’s Cove, a picture perfect white sandy beach known as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. When we arrived, there wasn’t a soul on the beach - just us, a couple of chairs and the crashing waves. 

After relaxing in utter seclusion, we headed on to Boston Bay, the birthplace of Jamaican jerk where we sampled some of the local flavors and checked out the surfers in the bay. After our hearty (and decidedly overpriced) lunch, we headed up to the extremely secluded Reach Falls – a place so remote, not even our driver had ventured there before. Alone at the falls except for the security guard and a couple of guides, we got a private tour up the river where we climbed behind the falls, dropped down into caverns and slid along slides carved out of rocks by the river. 

We capped our day with a stop in Port Antonio where we wandered through the local markets and indulged in some famous Devon House I-Scream – one of the top 5 best ice creams in the world.

 Just as our honeymoon had been four years prior, it was an amazing trip. We returned home completely relaxed, rejuvenated and refreshed by the warm Jamaican hospitality and new sights and tastes we experienced while there. No matter how long our list of places to travel gets, Jamaica will always remain one of our favorite go-to spots.