Jensen Swam Ahead...

...well not technically, but if you know what the title of this blog means you get like 1000 blog points. So here I am, 26 and extremely happy! I'm married to the girl of my dreams and figured it was about time I put up some pictures of our honeymoon. After much deliberation we decided that we both wanted to go to Florida. We chose Clearwater, mostly because it didn't sound to touristy and Southwest flies to Tampa, it sounded like the perfect place to stay. Our flight was great. We really didn't even have any major hiccups, (thanks to a great tip from Nola). Tropical Storm Enrique forced us to go to Chicago instead of Houston, but we made the best of it. We tried some "Chicago Style" Airport pizza and I even saw Topher Grace. So we ended up arriving a little later than we had planned, but at least we weren't stuck at an airport. Shawnee and I went to pick up our car (a hyundai accent), but we both decided to pay the "extra" money for a Sebring convertable...it was so worth it. I'm not gonna lie, because when we pulled up the hotel looked a little "ghetto", they had mandatory valet car service, which was pretty gay...so we tried our best to work around the rules. Because I'm cheap and didn't want to tip a guy for parking our car. I mean "I would tip my urologist, because I can't pulverize my own kidney stones, but I'm quite adept to parking cars." We lucked out on our room, because the hotel only had three rooms in the entire building with sunset views and we got one. The room was really nice. We had a huge fridge, dishes, a dishwasher, a great view, and two beds. One bed for sleeping and the other one for eating and well you know...

So on our first day we went to the beach. We started out at Clearwater Beach, but we ended up not liking it as much, because it was a little crowded. So we took the advice of one of the locals and drove about 45 minutes north to Honeymoon Island. Yes, Honeymoon Island, but however it wasn't the final destination. The drive there was so amazing. We had the top down and the views along the coast were really nice. There's something really nice about being in a convertable, the wind blowing in your hair and then you have everyone staring at you, it's quite cool. This island was so much better than the crowded Clearwater Beach. We were both starving, so we found the only cafe on Honeymoon Island which was cleverly named Cafe Honeymoon. It was run by this Mexican family, everything looked really good, but Shawnee of course got a chicken sandwich and me being the adventurous one tried a dish known only as The Sea Monster. It was basically a piece of fish rolled up to look like a hot dog, deep fried, and put in a hotdog bun. Quite possibly the best seafood hotdog I've ever had. From the cafe we took a ferry to Caladesi Island which was our final destination. The ferry was not cheap, but that kept most of the tourest away from the island. I mean you could count how many people were actually there with us. The picture above is actually from the island. We spent lots of time in the water, but we also looked for shells and laid out on the beach. We saw a snake, a really weird looking spider, a gopher turtle, an osprey, and a dolphin. It was really cool. We finished the day by going to Target and buying some dinner so we could cook it in our hotel room. We watched the sunset from our hotel room. It was absolutey beautiful. It was a great way to end a very fun day at the beach. We started the next day early, because we wanted to go to Busch Gardens Tampa Bay and see the zoo/theme park. We were both very excited. So we decided to eat our muffins and leave by 8:00 in the morning. I was eating outside on the balcony when I dropped a muffin crumb and a seagull decided to clean up the mess. I was pretty taken back that it landed like literally 6 inches from my foot so I dropped another crumb. So another bird flew to get that one. Well I got scared, (I've seen birds...I know what they are capable of), so I ran inside and shut the door. Shawnee thought it was hillarious and wanted me to go outside and take a video of it, so of course I went back out on the balcony and paraded around with the seagulls for a bit.

After driving around Tampa for a little bit we finally made it to Busch Gardens. There is really not much to say about the theme park. We rode some really awesome rides and saw a lot of wild animals. We recommend this park to anyone. We left the theme park early, because we got really hungry. So we stopped at Olive Garden and had dinner. We left for the hotel and got to bed pretty early because our flight left at 6:00 in the morning. We got home okay and now we are just living the married couple life.