Thursday, January 29, 2009

Anguilla... a First Glimpse

This blog post is just going to be torture - TORTURE - for Ashley and Jamie (sorry guys!)... We're going to start by sharing some of our first and last impressions of the island. A few wedding pictures will follow. :)

First of all, this was the view from our little apartment at Turtle's Nest Beach Resort.


The view didn't change much, but we photographed it repeatedly.



Here is our resort viewed from down the beach... notice how many people are on this beach?


Here is the inside of where we stayed. Turtles Nest Beach Resort was a perfect base for us - central to all of the wedding festivities, immediately on the beach, daily housecleaning and lots of beach towels, and lots and lots of peace and quiet. I highly recommend it.







A neighboring resort:


We spent as much time as possible exploring the island. Here's Matt in our sporty jeep - don't worry, he didn't shoot the wedding with that camera.


Traffic signs on the island are a little different, but fairly self-explanatory:


I took the following pictures on my "location scout" tour around the island... guess which spot we went back to for a "day after" shoot with the bride and groom?















There are lots of domestic farm animals on Anguilla - chickens, goats, cows, donkeys, and dogs. We didn't see any wildlife, except for many different kinds of water birds.





As we were driving Matt saw a desperate lady with a baby waving at cars for a ride. So he decided to pull over and help (because she really did look like she was having an emergency) only to be suckered into giving a ride for her whole family that was hiding behind the street sign awaiting such fools:) So they all piled in and we ended up driving them to do one small errand before dropping them off. Here we all are packed into the tiny jeep.


On our first day we checked out a couple of the locations for the wedding weekend. The Moroccan-themed architecture of Cap Juluca, beautiful rocks and beach, and dramatic sky let us know that we were in for a really beautiful wedding.



This is the inside of Pimms, the restaurant where the wedding reception was held.


After the wedding weekend we decided to treat ourselves and stay one extra day for a little r & r before returning to cold cold Boston. This meant that we got to watch Barack Obama's inauguration from Anguilla, and we chose a rustic beach bar for our inauguration base. Anguillians are probably 99.999% pro-Obama, so it was really exciting to watch the inauguration with them.

In the back of this crowd is a man wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. Matt later put on his B cap and introduced himself:) As Matt suspected, Robert is from the Boston area and we ended up having a nice long conversation on the beach. He's already emailed asking us when we'd blog these shots:) (Hi Robert!)




(the bartender is pointing to her goose bumps)








We're culling through the thousands of images we captured while on the island... stay tuned for more soon!