A Not-So-Crazy Honeymoon

After the hectic lead-up to our fantastic wedding day, Maria and I finally took a much-needed break for our honeymoon. And if you know Maria and me, our honeymoon wasn’t exactly a cookie-cutter honeymoon (though we did go to a sunny location because who doesn’t love the beach?).

We took a couple days off after the wedding before heading down to Florida, which I highly recommend. by the time we arrived, we at least had a good chunk of our sanity back.

The first thing we did was get our rental car and headed straight for our resort. We stayed at La Playa Resort in Naples. Just look at these pictures of the hotel lobby and you’ll see why we wanted to stay there.

And then we walked into our room. It was stunning.

We brought a framed photo from the wedding day as a gift for a relative of Maria’s who lived in the area. In the meantime, it was a perfect accent to our room.

Then there was the balcony. We loved the balcony.

We spent a lot of time hanging out on the balcony because the view was great and we were often not in direct sunlight (our pale skin couldn’t handle the sun very well). We even bought wine and charcuterie for the balcony since we were out there so much.

We saw so many wonderful sunsets without ever having to leave the hotel room.

The resort had a fantastic beach, too. We spent a good amount of time reading on the beach and having a few drinks from the tiki bar.

Lounging at the resort isn’t all we did, though. There was plenty for us to do in the Naples area. First, we visited downtown Naples and the Naples Pier, which we loved. We also had a fair bit of fun posing for photos along the way.

The pier gave us a great view of the beach curving away toward the horizon and hinted at the gorgeous houses along the waterfront.

There was plenty of wildlife hanging around the water wherever you went, including lots of pelicans.

We also went on a dolphin cruise in the hopes of seeing more wildlife. We were glad we did. There certainly were plenty of dolphins on the trip.

We also got to see beautiful Sanibel Island from the dolphin boat.

See those people on the Sanibel beach? The dolphins were swimming right up to them to check them out!

Besides the dolphin cruise, we did one other really touristy thing: we went on a trolley tour of the Naples area. It was cheesy, but I loved it. Our tour guide was a trip. He would interrupt himself mid-sentence to point out some sight, tell a five minute story about that sight, and then seemlessly complete the thought he had initially interrupted!

We saw some of the gorgeous houses in the Naples area.

And this gigantic banyan tree that is over 100 years old!

After that tour, we realized that we wanted to see even more of the stunning houses in the Naples area, so we decided to take a sunset dining cruise on the Naples Princess that showed off the area harbor and waterways, including all of the incredible houses. It turned out to be one of our favorite parts of the whole honeymoon. The ship itself was beautiful.

It had three levels, with the top level being completely open. It gave us a fantastic view of the harbor and the houses we passed by.

We actually had some pretty strong thunderstorms roll by while we were eating dinner. But once dinner was over and the storms had passed, we were able to cruise out in to the Gulf of Mexico to witness a jaw-dropping sunset.

Coming from the Detroit area, Maria and I have both spent a fair amount of time at Greenfield Village, which is a large outdoor museum where Henry Ford collected buildings related to the industrial revolution. A fair number of the buildings are from Ford Motor Company and Thomas Edison. When Maria and I learned that Fort Myers (a short drive away from Naples) was the home of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s winter estates, we had to go check them out!

Unfortunately, approaching thunderstorms closed the estate grounds early, so we were only able to see part of Thomas Edison’s summer home and none of Henry Ford’s. What we did see, though, was beautiful.

I would love to have an office like this in our future home.

We spent the remainder of our time checking out the on-site museum, which was filled with inventions of Thomas Edison and the attached botanical laboratory, which is still on site. This was his office at the lab.

Towards the end of one of our days, we decided to walk on the beach and watch the sunset. Of course, the camera came along, too.

On our final day, we went to meet Maria’s aunt and uncle for dinner at Fisherman’s Village in Punta Gorda.

After dinner we headed back to our resort and spent one last evening on the balcony. First, we watched the sun set.

And then the thunderstorms rolled in. And we caught it on camera.

And on video:

Crazy lightning storm over the Gulf of Mexico tonight. It’s our last night of the #honeymoon and we are watching in awe. The #lightning has been #nonstop

A video posted by Maria and Rob (@crazytogetherblog) on Jun 20, 2015 at 7:16pm PDT

We had an absolutely wonderful time on our honeymoon. It was a much-needed break after months of wedding planning and moving. We were so thankful that we were able to have such a fantastic vacation and come home rested and refreshed after our nuptials. We know you are eager to see photos and read more about our wedding and we hope to share that with you in greater detail very soon!