Now some of you may be thinking "Wait, wasn't there already a Crowley Family Vacation this year?" Well, yes, we all trekked out to Steamboat in January, but this vacation was purely an ad hoc adventure.

You see, my cousin Michelle is friends with this other girl Michelle who's sister Lynn was getting married in Jamaica. Cousin Michelle and my mom were both invited to the wedding, and when as my mom didn't want to go alone, she recruited Little Sister Katie to head down with her. When I heard Katie was going, I too wanted in. When Jonathan heard I was going, he also wanted to go. And when Dig heard that the two of us were in, he decided to come along too.


Our flight was set for Sunday morning, 7:00a. A few days prior my dad had given me the whole "it's an international flight - make sure to be at the airport extra early!" speech so I had this Master Plan(tm) of staying out all night Saturday like a rock star, motivating to the airport when the bars close around 4am, and then just sleeping on the plane. Perfect.

A few kids came over, we drank a few hundred beers on the fire escape, Jonathan met up with us late night, we hit up Rosarios for a Frankie and Cheese... and the next thing I know, it's 6:05am, Jonathan's trying to wake me up, I'm passed out on top my bed with my sneakers on and we're two hours behind our planned schedule.

I totally thought we were going to miss our flight - the voices in my head were warming of the wrath Big Dig would have when he heard we weren't at the airport a good three hours early. Luckily, we had both packed the night before and had the good fortune of grabbing a superstar cab driver who whisked us to JFK @ 75mph. We even made it to Gate A with just enough time for a below-average breakfast sandwich croissant and half a game of Ms. Pac Man.

NYC to Jamaica is a pretty short flight - around 3 1/2 hours. Factoring in the time difference, Jay and I arrive around 1pm, miraculously run into my parents at the baggage claim (simple things like this still amaze me), wait 40 minutes for stoopid Jonathan to find the two giant bags he checked through, then motivated to the bus (sweet) for the hour-and-a-half-trek through Jamaica's poorest neighborhoods to our fancy pants resort, Beaches, Negril.


Anyway, we finally arrive at the resort and check-in around 3:00, unpack, shower, iron and we're off to the wedding at 4pm. Here's Lynn and her brand new husband Dennis (not me) all married up on the beach.


And here's me sweating like a fat kid.


Mom and dad, out on the beach doing the whole mock renew-our-wedding-vows thing.


Post-wedding and post-wedding reception, we finally got a chance to scout out the resort. It's an all inclusive deal - all the food you can eat, all the drinks you can drink - with a handful of pools and probably a quarter mile of private beach. Super nice.

Arguably the best part is these swim-up bars they have. Just swim on up and order drinks in the pool - genius! Here's the first joke to get old - the 'ol pretend to be drunk at the swim up bar and pass out in the water. RDRR. Jay seems to still think it's funny.

And more of the swim-up bar. Note the little circles hanging from the roof of the bar (though you can barely see them in this pic) - each one is a sign advertising a different signature drink - fruity, girly, delicious. Jonathan and I started off all ambitious in an attempt to make it "round the world" style by sampling every one - I think the master plan was to sample all 15 drinks in one day.

We made it about 4 drinks in before we realized that the drinks at this resort don't contain any alcohol. Despite the exaggerated pours of the bartenders, there's no way to get drunk off the drinks they're serving up... something has got to be watered down. I mean, it's actually pretty smart on their part - not as a cost savings, but do you really want 40 year-old women throwing up all over themselves in the pool?

A bit of advice: if you want to get wrecked, stick with the Red Strip.


This is a little reverse-chronological, but when we were checking in they had all these flyers laying around advertising how dizzope the resort is supposed to be. I mean, look at these people! All hot and stuff, wearing little jungle leaf outfits.

I'm sad to report these people weren't at the resort. In fact, the place we stayed at is what's classified as a "family resort" (as opposed to, say, a "couples report" or "singles resort"). Both resorts were a few miles down the street from us, the latter called "Hedonism II". Sounds dirty.

Another bit of advice: and no, you can't walk from resort to the next on the beach.


So, what are two sexy, sunburned, single swingers to do?


Well, for one there's the bar. Packed. Or maybe not. In the absence of things to do, Jonathan I ended up making up little games to play. For example...

Note: That's "Johnny Abercrombie" in the middle. Everyday he wore a different Abercrombie shirt - each one sporting the "1987" logo in a different way. By the way, Little Sister Katie loves loves loves Johnny Abercrombie.


... who can toss the key closest to the end of the table without it falling off (hard)...


... and bounce the exercise ball back into the little shelf it came from (easy)...


... and don't forget the mock game show held for the kiddies.

The kid in the middle (er, the one with 0 points) is Tyler, Lynn and Dennis' son. He was robbed at trivia by the bigger kids (more specifically, that one giant kid with glasses in the back), but held his own in the musical chairs-esque contest that was held the next day. Recognize!

Now, I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression by complaining about the nightlife - Crowley Family Vacation Jamaica was off the hook. The water is super clear, the beaches are super nice and it's just nice to lounge and do nothing all day.

ps: My new digicam takes the bestest pictures ever.

ps: Stop staring at my sister.


Before I left NYC, we were keeping a watchful eye on weather.com who was predicting nothing but rain, rain, rain for 3 days in a row. Luckily, we had perfect weather almost the entire trip...


... with a few random 10-minute showers here and there to break up the sun.


Speaking of which, I got more sunburned than I've ever been in my entire life. All that is from one morning (prob 2 hours) out in the sun with SPF 8 on. I am so so so stoopid.


"All-inclusive" generally implies that the food isn't that good - which it isn't. Everyday, for every meal, there's a buffet to choose from (which is actually pretty good if you hit it at the right time), but when you venture into the land of resort restaurants you get treated to random things like the Jamaican Iron Chef.

Note: my mom and Auntie Jean in the background, wow-ed by the Ichiban skills.


Honestly, we really just lounged on the beach all week. Katie and Michelle mixed it up with some parasailing, Jay and Katie went snorkeling and I took scuba lessons (hold on, I'll get to that), but that's about it.

Big Dig sprung for the glass bottom boat (and a cooler for Red Stripe) for all 14 of us (er, us + cousin michelle + auntie jean + wedding party & friends) so we could journey over to "Rick's Point", rumored to be the best place to watch the sunset in Jamaica and a good place to watch the natives dive "300 feet" (or so we heard) into the water.

[view video of glass bottom boat action]

By the way, 300 feet is like 30 stories, and no one is jumping 30 stories into the ocean. My guess was 30 feet, but more on that in a second...

  
... as soon as we take a quick break to check out Shoops all sauced up in her $5 sunglasses...


... Okay, so onto Rick's. We take our rickety boat like 30 minutes across the bay, pull up to Rick's and literally jump out of the boat and onto a rock staircase (no dock or anything).

They've got this setup where you can drive off cliffs from different heights - 15 feet and 48 feet - or watch (and tip) the native Jamaicans who will do crazy olympic style dives from 48, and I guess around 90 feet up.

The 15 foot drop is to the right of the guy with the blue bandana. The 48 foot drop is ontop of that huge rock, left side, where the woman with the red shirt is standing. 90 feet is from the trees way that are cropped out of the photo.

[click to watch video of jamaica native dropping 90 feet]


Here's the crowd watching the jumpers.

Little Sister Katie was the first to motivate and launch off the 48-footer which, no joke, is the bravest thing I've ever seen. It took me like 10 minutes after that just to get up the nerve to jump off the 15 footer and like another 20 minutes to do the 48 footer. It's a long way down - you have enough airtime for three or four rolling-down-the-windows arm motions.

[click to watch video of me jumping]


Okay, back to the resort. We were there for, um, five days total and on day two I decided to get certified for scuba diving. The motivation mostly came from some friends at home who are also certified - Lt. Rob Moore, Mike Ferrari, Ms. Nicole Dever - so I figured I'd do the same. Nicole in particular was a catalyst, stressing how much easier it is to get certified down in the Caribbean. Whatever.


The whole certification process was actually about 20x as much more work as I expected it to be - when you sign up you get a 200 page book to read and, in addition to 2 pool dives (just to practice shit), there's four open-water dives (read: ocean) and a written test.

I ended up in this class with four other kids, two of which are shown here as we're cramming for the test. How'd it turn out? One guy flunked the required swimming test on day 1 (ssh - I cheated), the girl on the left failed the written test twice (ouch), and the kid on the right was too afraid to take it without studying. As for me...


... how hard can a stoopid scuba test be? 50 questions, most of them multiple choice, but and a lot of them being high school physics (which, er, I don't know at all... e.g. "If you take an upside down glass filled with water 30 feet below the surface, the pressure inside the class will be ___% of what it was on the surface") and crazy math (which I'm also stoopid at, e.g. "If you make a dive in the morning to a depth of 43 feet for 35 minutes, then take a surface break for 25 minutes, what is your maximum underwater time for an afternoon dive to a depth of 55 feet?").

Anyway, I scored an 87. Yeah!

Note: Er, 84 in the picture, but I made Tiny change it to an 87 because he graded me wrong.


Oh, who's Tiny? Our Ruben-sized scuba instructor of course. Dur.


The dives are crazy - each is about 30 minutes with about 15 minutes of "exercises" once you reach the ocean floor (working towards certification - e.g. remove your mask from your face, hold it arms length from your body then but it back on - at 60 feet underwater) and then 15 minutes of "exploration".

On our second dive, we were exploring coral caves. On our fourth, dive we went down to about 60 feet to check out a wrecked plane. Yes, we saw all sorts of crazy underwater stuff - eels, starfish, schools of blue fish. No sharks though (which is fine by me).


While I was slaving away in scuba land, Katie and Jay went the one-day snorkeling route and still ended up taking better pictures than me.

Check out the view from our room. Just past the trees is the ocean.

[click to listen to the crazy alien sounds all the bugs make]


The journey back was rather uneventful - another hour-and-a-half bus trek to the airport, a delicious burger at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville airport restaurant...

Random complaint: No movie on the way back to NYC, and on the way out they stopped the movie, "The Recruit", about 10 minutes before it was over - right during the crazy climax at the end. Damn you Air Jamaica!


... and Jonathan betting the luggage carousel trifecta: black bag, red backpack, Seabiscuit.