As I am sure many of you know, Adam and I took our long overdue honeymoon this past week to celebrate our one year of marriage. We decided to take a 5 day cruise to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and we went with the Carnival cruise line. Having only experienced one other cruise, it was hard to tell if Carnival was amazing or not; but, needless to say, Adam and I had a BLAST while we were celebrating this week on and off of the ship! The week was filled with lots of sight seeing & LOTS of gourmet food.
Every day, we were given an itinerary outlining all of the exciting things that were going on while we were on the ship. Our vacation days went as follows: Boston (in port), day at sea, St. John (in port), Halifax (in port), day at sea, and Boston (in port). We typically filled our days with exploring, soaking in some sun, enjoying the hot tubs at the top of the boat, catching a few comedy skits, and participating in trivia!
The main dining room, where we enjoyed many of our meals on board, was just gorgeous! It had so many beautiful details all around the room, and there was so much light coming in that it really created a romantic setting for our meals. We almost always got the same table, and it was at the very back of the room right next to the window with literally the BEST view! We enjoyed so many beautiful sunsets!
Almost every breakfast we grabbed one plate for the two of us, and dove right in to all of the yummy food on board! With the exception of breakfast, we tried to make an effort to try different types of foods that we wouldn't normally eat. I had my first eggs benedict experience, though, and it was fantastic!
The first day at sea was very cloudy, but it was still just so beautiful!
We took the time on this cloudy day to spend some extra time inside, and one of our favorite things we did on board this past week was our wine paring class!
So yeah! We coughed up the extra money to go ahead and sign ourselves up for our very first wine paring class! Let me give you a little run down on the wine we tried: riesling, sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot noir, and cabernet sauvignon!
Overall, the one thing we took away from this is that you should not restrict yourself to red=meat, white=chicken/fish. I can attest to the fact that that does not work for every type of food you would think it would work well with!
Sommelier Marin gave us a sampling of different family groups of foods that typically need wine paring (i.e. acidic, tart, sweet, bitter, salt, fishy, and rich).
We learned so much from sommelier, Marin, and we're super excited to start paring!
And then finally we made it to St. John!
We spent our day in St. John exploring this small city, and some of the surrounding neighborhoods. Although this was a small city compared to Halifax, St. John was just darling and we had a lot of fun exploring all around the pier.
When the day in St. John came to an end, we got back on the boat and headed right to Halifax! We spent a lot of time checking out the tall ships in Halifax, and it was really awesome timing considering the fact that they are all in town to celebrate the bicentennial of the War of 1812 (AND the centennial of the Titanic).
Both of these memorable events in history greatly affected Nova Scotia, and it was just really cool (being that Adam is a huge history buff) that we fell right into the centennial and bicentennial events. We LOVED our day in Halifax!
This was the point of the day where I was just craving something sweet! We fell right into this random bakery on our way to Citadel Hill:
Susie's Shortbreads!
This was such an ADORABLE little hole in the wall bakery! Adam had their turtle cupcake, and I had the death by chocolate! Soooo good! Totally worth the cavities!
Our favorite part of the day in Halifax was when we did a tour of Citadel Hill!
And there were many photos of my husband posing with machinery!
Oh, boys and their toys! ;)
To top off our day in Halifax, we visited this really sweet looking cafe:
The Bicycle Thief. Upon first glance, it had a very indie/hipster looking theme to it, but when we got in there, I felt a very nice balance between indie-inspired decor and East Coast decor. It had the nice, hardwood flooring and furniture any New Englander could find in their aunt's Cape house, but it had the ever-so-hip mason jar chandelier I see nearly every day on
Pinterest! Right from the get-go, I knew it was my kind of cafe!
We also took a moment to whip out our iPhones and check up on our emails. It's hard being completely disconnected from the world, you know?! :)
The food. OMG.
Yeah, no words needed to describe how good this food was!
We snapped a few more gorgeous scenic shots of Halifax, and made our way back to the ship to enjoy another full day at sea before we made it back to Boston! We enjoyed a few more sweets, a few more drinks, and a few more laughs before our honeymoon came to an end. It was such a perfect week! We really needed this!
So what's next you might ask? Well, I'm thinking we'll be planning a nice dinner in the near future and try out some of our wine paring skills we got from our trip!
