Alpine Loop

Utah is one of the most beautiful places- I love the pretty color of the trees and the gorgeous mountains everywhere. For this reason, I'm obsessed with the Alpine loop drive. You get such pretty views of Utah, and the entrance is conveniently right by our house in Highland.

We first drove by a really great view of Timp. For some reason, I have no desire to hike to the top of this mountain though it's a popular hike. Even though I love hiking, every single one of my friends that has hiked to the top gets lost somewheres along the way and says it takes like 10 hours. I'll take the view I get from right here :)

Then, we drove by this really pretty grove of bright yellow and green trees. The colors were crazy!

Man, I love these trees and they are everywhere along this drive.

I can't wait to do this drive again soon when the colors will change even more during fall:)

Sunday Thought

Happy Sunday! I came across this little thought below on Instagram today and I loved the message...

It made me think that throughout our lifetime, we will all achieve many different goals, however, I believe that our greatest accomplishments and our greatest happiness will come from the service we've given to others. No amount of earthly success will mean anything unless we've lived a life of use to others. We are here on earth to make other lives better and to improve the world around us. Our continuous goal should be to make every person that we come in contact with a little bit better.

It's easy to get caught up in our own lives and become pretty self-centered. In fact, I'm reading How to Win Friends and Influence people and Dale Carnegie said: "When we are not engaged in thinking about some definite problem, we usually spend about 95 percent of our time thinking about ourselves". It's so true! It's easy to be self-obsessed, but to find true joy, we must focus on things outside of ourselves. No one finds true happiness until they surrender their ego to the service of their fellow man. "If you're not making someone else's life better, then you're wasting your time. Your life will become better by making other lives better." -Will Smith

Just a little Sunday thought :)

Other things we do on Sunday are bake cookies with these cute kids...

and hang out with our precious nieces and nephews! :)

Oh, how I love them all! Especially adorable little baby Dean :)

Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia was one of our favorite places!! The highlight here was definitely Sugar Bay beach. It's a little, beautiful beach tucked right in between the two famous pitons on a luxury resort. Even though it's on a nice hotel, the beach is public beach so anyone can go.

There were water hammocks in the ocean that you could lay in. I love these things! We could have just stayed out there all day.

How cute are these little tiki umbrellas on the beach:)

With a view like this it's hard to leave. On one side, we saw the Grand Piton...

and on the other side of us was the Petit Piton...

and behind us was this is the amazing resort! We felt like we were in a little piece of heaven (we looked up this resort online after and found that it's like $2,500 a night to stay here in their private villas. So crazy!)

Barbados

Our next stop was to Barbados (aka the place where Rihanna is from;)! Unfortunately, the weather report said it was going to rain all day so we decided to do something indoors. We took a tour of Harrison's Cave, which is a pretty cave that's about 150 feet underground. The tour takes you to huge caverns and through tunnels to see pretty rock formations with little streams and a mini waterfall.

After, went to a place called Hunte's Gardens and a cute old man named Anthony greeted us. He told us his life story of how he created the garden, which is his backyard, and lived in the house at the top for the last ~15 years. The plants and flowers we saw there were beautiful, SO colorful, and unlike anything I've seen before. We loved it.

St. Thomas, Virgin Islands

Our first stop on our cruise was to Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands. This place is gorgeous! From practically any point of the island, you can see so many other islands in the distance. It's magical.

We rented a car and first stopped at Drake's Seat, a look out point that gives great views of Magens Bay.

Then we went down to Magens Bay to walk the beach and swim around.

Flamenco beach on Culebra Island

About 4 years ago, I had a really good friend in college that had traveled all over the world. I asked him what his favorite place of all was and he told me Flamenco beach on Culebra Island. Ever since then, I've always wanted to go! So, when Dallin and I were in Puerto Rico, we sure weren't going to pass this place up. We booked a sailboat excursion online to take us to the island and beach, and lucky for us the weather was perfect that day.

Flamenco beach just might be the best place on earth (okay, I might be a little over dramatic), but seriously I totally see why it's rated like the #5 beach in the world. The sand is so white and soft, the water is a pretty seafoam green color that's crystal clear, and it's shallow so you can walk really far out. Oh, not to mention it feels like getting in a warm bath tub! It' just gorgeous. I probably could have spent our whole trip here.

We just bought a GoPro, so of course we had to experiment and take some underwater pictures.

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Dallin & I decided that we wanted to take a little, last-minute summer vacation since we hadn't really done a trip in awhile. We decided that a cruise might be the best thing to do last minute since it doesn't require too much planning and we could kind of wing it. While we both had never been on a cruise before, we knew that we wanted to do the one that had the most stops (we'd go crazy on a ship for too long!). It turned out that there was only one cruise we found that had 5 stops, and it was a southern caribbean cruise that left from Puerto Rico. So, we went to Puerto Rico a few days in advance to do some cool things before boarding our ship.

We spent the first day walking the streets of Old San Juan and seeing the pirate forts.

I love walking the downtown area, it's just so charming and quaint. There's really pretty doors everywhere like these..

and such cute buildings painted bright colors

and the cobblestone road that paves the streets is just so pretty, old and blue!

While walking downtown, we stopped at this place called Casa Cortes ChocoBar and had the most delicious hot chocolate. Puerto Rico is known for it's cocoa which was perfect because Dallin and I are obsessed with hot chocolate! The only weird thing is that they like to put cheese in their hot chocolate :0

Our Caribbean Cruise Video

Dallin and I just got back from a little trip to the Caribbean, and we had a blast! It was our first cruise ever and it had 5 stops: St. Thomas, Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and St. Martin. We bought a GoPro right before the trip and made this little video of clips from the different islands that we explored. Dallin loved taking videos of everything with it, it's so nice that you never have to worry about it getting wet or breaking. It really is the perfect camera for trips! Anyways, he's a little video of our adventures in the Caribbean. More posts to come soon about each island we saw:)

St. Kitts

Saint Kitts was so relaxing. The first stop we took was to Brimstone Hill Fortress. To be honest, we liked exploring the forts in Puerto Rico way more than this. But on the bright side, we did see monkeys here!

St. Martin

St. Martin was amazing, we loved every minute here!

Maho beach was definitely my favorite stop on this island. It's a little beach right next to the airport, so you can see planes land and take off right by you. We hung out there for about an hour just watching planes come and go. It was really cool! I didn't get any videos, but you can check out some cool videos other people took in this video.

We first went snorkeling at this beach called Divi Little Bay, and saw the biggest fish I've ever seen. We were freaked out that!

 

We then stopped at this beach called Simpson beach and it had the softest sand ever. We also went to this place called Mullet Bay that I loved swimming in, but I didn't take any pictures, shoot! It was seriously the best place to swim and play:)

We also met these 3 girls who caught some lizards and they let me play with them for a little :)