Honeymoon: Day 3

We stalked Josephine's Cafe, waiting until it opened at 11 a.m. as our stomachs were growling.

It was 11:05 a.m., but the workers weren't quite ready as they were on island time.

Finally, I went back in for a second time and asked the employees chatting around one of the tables if they were open, and they let us in.

Nate ordered a seafood wood-fire oven pizza, and I decided to try the seafood crepe, since I wanted to branch out a little on vacation.

Branch out, I did.

About in the middle of my crepe, a little purple octopus rolled out and onto the white dish in front of me.

I wasn't sure what to do.

I rolled it over with my fork as my shoulders tensed together a bit, and it's little black eyes looked at me.

"Nate, there's an octopus. I'm not sure if I can eat this."

I cut it in half, thinking that might be better than popping the thing in whole. But I still wasn't sure if I could eat something with its tentacles showing.

"Will you eat one first?" I asked my husband.

I dug around deeper into the crepe and found another one, which he grabbed and popped into his mouth. Bolstering myself off his courage, I stuck my fork in the dense creature and ate it, its legs feeling odd on my tongue. However, Nate was proud of me for trying something that I hadn't before.

Nate has a big thing about people who won't branch out. He doesn't care if I don't like what I try - for instance, the conch we ate on Key Largo - but he just wants me to test stuff out. He has gotten me to try a lot of new things in our relationship, and I usually enjoy them.

After lunch, Nate and I went down to the water sports hut and picked up some flippers for the snorkeling excursion we signed up for.

On the boat, we put on the bright yellow jackets that would help boats to not run over us. We cleaned out the goggles and snorkels with disinfectant, and then we jumped into the clear water and swam around to see the wildlife.

Nate and I held hands as we swam, pointing out blue fish, striped ones, barracudas, coral and sea anemones. Perhaps my favorite part was just doing something so exotic hand-in-hand with my new husband.

After the snorkeling trip was over and our faces had nice goggle imprints on them, we went back to the water sports hut and asked to take out a hobby craft. A worker hopped on with us and taught us how to steer, speed up and slow down. Then he took us back to shore, jumped off and let us go.

Nate took the reins at the helm and I just relaxed as we whooshed across the blue bay, the giant Sandals sail waving above us and the sun shining down on us. All I felt was peace.

After two trips across the bay and back, we got out and met up with the friends we had met earlier in the week at the pool. We swam around, and then they ended up leaving for another Sandals resort on the island to eat dinner, but we went up to our room to get ready for the reservation we had at the Italian restaurant at our resort.

The restaurant closed at 9 p.m. and our reservation was for 8:45 p.m. But that didn't stop us from ordering four courses of food, at which our server didn't look happy. We promised her that we eat fast, and she laughed when we polished off the seafood fritter appetizer in about 30 seconds.

The zuppa soup was absolutely delectable, and then I had my first lamb chops.

Wow.

Nate had some seafood pasta, but I have to say my lamb chops might have been the best thing I ate all vacation.

Dessert was tiramisu, and then we spent a little time on our balcony before going to sleep.

Another successful, relaxing day on St. Lucia ended.