Wedding and Honeymoon!

The wedding was amazing and beautiful and was everything we hoped that it would be!!  We have so many pictures to look at from all of my friends, family, and professional photographer!!  If you want to see the professional photos, here's the link to the website: www.blackburnstudios.com.  Click on the "more photos" icon in the bottom left, and scroll down until you see the "Kinley-Daniels wedding".  Then, you can click on the photos to see them bigger than thumbnail size!!  My cousin also took some amazing pictures, and I have a great assortment to look at from my friends!!

Here are a couple of my own pictures:

My bridesmaid and house party at the Chocolate Bar in Houston!

Left side: My sister and I

Top right: House party girls - Sarah, Jen, Sperry, and Niestradt

Bottom left: my bridesmaids - Kelly, Katie, Jen, and Catherine (my friend Laura showed up later, on the day before the wedding!)

Getting our hair done and getting moral support from my bridesmaids!

Getting dressed before the wedding!

Why I love my friends :-)  (We were all laughing so hard over this...)

My dear friends Brad and Jen Ragan and my new husband! :-)

Our honeymoon was amazing.  Costa Rica is a beautiful place, and we absolutely loved it.  We arrived there the Sunday night after the wedding and had private transportation to our beautiful hotel in San Jose.  The next morning, we had another private van to take us to the Tabacon Springs in La Fortuna.  The trip out there was beautiful, and we had a very talkative guide who told us many things about the country!  I practiced my Spanish a little bit and was so glad he was so patient!  We stayed at the hot springs for two nights, enjoying a horseback riding trip by the famous volcano which led us to a beautiful waterfall!  Travis was also really excited about eating a banana straight off a tree.  We couldn't find the perfect one, though, until we made it to our next stop!  Here are some pictures (you can click on the collages to make them bigger)...

After our two day stay at the hot springs, we had (yet another) private transportation to our next stop.  We were heading to the river for a rafting trip which would take us to Pacuare Lodge, a "hotel" out in the middle of the jungle!  We met another couple from North Carolina, and they joined us on the river for the six mile raft into the jungles.  We stopped at the lodge, where we stayed for two nights in our own, private honeymoon suite.  It was quite a hike to get up to our lofty residence, but the view was stunning, and we enjoyed the seclusion.  We were waited on, hand and foot, by really nice people the entire time.  They cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday for us, and the food was amazing.  We took a canopy tour on the ropes course they had on the property, and we hiked to a waterfall (twice!).  It only rained once while we were there, and it was the most relaxing morning I have ever had.  We sat in our room and watched the rain come down.  There wasn't any electricity, so at night, we saw by candlelight.  The dinners were candlelit, and the rooms were also full of candles.  It was amazing!!  Here are pictures...

Along the way, our driver stopped to show us this really cool tree full of iguanas!  The man who owned the "Restaurante Las Iguanas" apparently feeds the iguanas so they will stick around, and has about 45 - 50 giant ones hanging out in the tree outside the restaurant!

This was our private honeymoon suite! :-)

After our two day stay at Pacuare, we got back in the rafts with two other couples and a family and started out on the 13 mile rafting trip back out of the jungles.  We stopped at a beautiful waterfall along the way and also had a stop for lunch.  The guides, again, made an amazing lunch and treated us like royalty.  Our rafting guide, Jose, was so awesome and made the trip really exciting.  Even when I lost my paddle, he still had a good attitude! (It floated downstream later, all bent and gimpy...)  He ran us straight into a rock at one point, and almost all of us fell out of the boat.  We almost lost him in one of the rapids, but we finally all made it out together.  A kayaking guide was also there, and he would speed ahead of us and take pictures as we were coming down the rapids.  This is why we have so many amazing pictures to share!!

This was the beautiful waterfall where we stopped along the river...

And, some of our fun river pictures!!

Once we got off the river, we had a four hour ride back to San Jose.  We dropped the other couples off at their hotels, got stuck in traffic, and FINALLY made it to our hotel by the airport.  After all our beautiful lodgings that week, the Holiday Inn wasn't really that exciting. :-)  We were so tired, though, that it didn't matter.  We laid out all our damp clothes from the rafting trip (which smelled awesome, by the way), had some dinner, and went to sleep.  We didn't really want to leave, but we drug ourselves to the airport the next morning to catch our flight.

The trip was absolutely amazing, and we both really enjoyed it!  We are looking forward to the chance to do something like this again.  Pura vida!