After all the whirlwind wedding events, Chris and I were long overdue for a nice vacation.  We spent our honeymoon at the Excellence Resort in Punta Cana.  We flew out on Monday morning (early - so early that we only spent a few hours in our fancy honeymoon suite in Providence the night before) and landed in the Dominican around two in the afternoon.  It was so, so awesome to be greeted at the front desk of the hotel, after hours of traveling and a hellish cab ride across the island, by a woman who said, "Welcome home, Mr. and Mrs. Sparling," and handed us a glass of champagne. 

The resort was just gorgeous.  We took hundreds of photos, with the white sand beaches and the thatch hut cottages as our backdrop.  We spent hours on the beach and in the pool, watching as a local hacked open a coconut with a machete, mixed up some crushed ice, rum, and assorted other goodies, and served us a Coco Loco to drink right out of the coconut shell.  And then there was a huge outdoor chess set, where my husband schooled me almost daily.

We ate at one of the fancy-pants restaurants every night.  We scrubbed off a day's worth of sand and sun and dressed ourselves up each day.  These dinners, my Faithful Readers, are where my diabetes bit the big one.  We had dessert with every meal.  And I don't even mean one dessert - there were multiple desserts with each seating.  My total daily dosage of insulin before the wedding was around 22 units per day.   On our honeymoon, my insulin needs bloated up to 40 ... 42 ... 45  units a day.  (That's an awful lot for me, as I usually eat low-carb and keep away from desserts.)  Thankfully, my blood sugars weren't crap the whole vacation.  They were actually pretty decent. 

We had a romantic dinner on the beach, where we dined on French cuisine.  (This is also where little sand bugs dined on us until we slathered ourselves with bug spray, but that's a story for another post.) 

We relaxed.  It was so awesome, especially after such a huge event.  And it was definitely nice to disconnect from the "real world" for a few days.  No emails, no cell phones, and absolutely no internet access.  We didn't worry about blogs or media ventures or articles that were pending or any blasted deadlines.  Our focus was on each other - and that was it. We disconnected in order to reconnect.  And it was awesome.  Now I know why people do second honeymoons.

(I'll add the rest of the honeymoon pictures to Flickr in the next few days.  I have plenty of Diabetes365 photos to upload!)