Have you ever had a vacation that you so desperately wanted? Have you ever looked at a clock and waited for a vacation,that needed to come? I have. The moments before this holiday vacation, I was always looking at the clock, waiting for that moment when we were released from school and I could get my tropical getaway. That tropical getaway did come one Friday,the Friday we were released from school. I packed as quick as I could, getting everything that I needed in as small a time as I could. I waited anxiously in the following hours, getting ready for what a new was going to come, 90* fahrenheit all the time, swimming,laughing and most importantly having a great time. I slept well that night, knowing that I was going to be having a great 9 days ahead of me.
The next morning was awful, my family and I got up at 4 o clock am to get to the airport because our flight was at 6:30 am. I dont really know why we got up so early considering the airport was 45 minutes away from our house and that security normally takes around 15 minutes, so we always end up getting through to our gate in around an hour and a half. Which then means we have an an hour of waiting and then the madness begins.This is where everyone in my family normally loses composure and starts getting tired and cranky realizing that we were going to be there for another hour. We always get on the plane sooner or later but its crazy trying to get through that time. After a painful hour we were on our flight to Philadelphia, which was our US airways hub that we were visiting because we fly with US airways. The Philadelphia flight ended up being a fairly easy flight. In fact for me, the flight ended up being fairly fun because Wills Moskow I kid in our grade ended up being on our flight and we talked for awhile. The hard one was Jamaica.
The Kelleher Jamaican flight was not one that we were most proud of. My dad and brother weren’t on the best terms during that flight and it carried through for my mom and I, which made that 3 and a 1/2 hour flight quite an awful ride. Then when we landed it was amazing, the trees outside were blowing in the cool breeze and it looked warm out, perfect. We had finally arrived In Jamaica, and it looked like it was going to be fun!
My first impression of Jamaica when we got off our flight and saw the line at customs, that we were going to be here for ages. The great fact of the matter however was that It only took 30 minutes! The line got so long at one point that they opened up a few more lines and it sped the lines up massively! In just a few quick hours, we were at our hotel. We were staying at a Hotel called Iberostar and I cannot express how good the hotel was. There was volleyball games going all the time, there was an activities every single hour from 8am-7pm! The activities included Beach soccer, scuba diving,darts and much more! The hotel was fun for a long time, in fact we did not even exit the hotel and see what Jamaica was really like for a few days! When we finally did, it was a phenomenal decision.
The first activity was a tourist party boat. We didn’t know that the boat was a party boat and we ended up being the only 2 kids on the boat My brother and I. Most of the other passengers at the party, were either 50 year old single woman and men, trying to fit in and be cool again or college kids who had boyfriends and girlfriends, it was a group of about 75% college kids and 25% and 50 year old glory day hunters. The boat we were on was called Cool Runnings and there was a Jamaican Fun guide who basically just asked us questions the entire time and after every time he said something serious he said, “No Problem”?!? Us passengers would reply yeah! The first attraction we visited on that boat was a cool snorkeling place five minutes out.
The snorkeling wasn't the best, because it wasn’t the best reef I’ve been to but,it was still fun. The most fun part about it was swimming in the open ocean looking at the fish and meeting up with My brother and looking at the reef. I went to multiple areas and the high point was seeing a sting ray for around one second before it swam back under a rock! Overall, the snorkeling ended up being fun even though it wasn’t the best snorkeling I have ever done.
The second thing we did on that trip, was going to Dunns River Falls. Dunns River Falls, is a famous 1100 foot waterfall, that you have to climb up with a group. You hang onto your other group members and at various points there is jumps and slides that are completely naturally made and are necessary to be completed to be able to get to the top. There were spiders everywhere,massive things, everywhere, they were called Banana Spiders. They just hung from the trees and scared the crap out of you! Dunns river falls was really cool and ended up being one of the highlights of our trip! The problem was that the way back was a complete party boat with everyone like twerking and stuff, so everyone in my family just stayed away, it was still pretty fun though. All in all I can say that the boat we took called “Cool Runnings” named after the historic Jamaican bobsled team took us to some sweet places! We saw Mickjagger's house, which used to be owned by Arthur ashe, the best part of that trip however, was definitely Dunns river falls as it ended up being one of the best moments in the trip, but nothing tops the last day trip we went on.
So for the next few days (about I week) we stayed at our hotel and had some fun in the pool and played loads of volleyball. The worst part about the volleyball however, was that I was awful at it, I always tried to catch the ball but, of course you're not allowed catch the ball! The great thing about going to Iberostar (our hotel) was that there was loads of nice staff. These Jamaican staff members however, were very competitive. To the point where if you weren’t good at the thing you were playing, they would say things behind your back, which annoyed me a lot because everyone knew I was absolutely awful at volleyball. My way out of being awful at volleyball I realized on the final day, that way out was beach soccer.
As some of you may know I would like to think of myself as quite a good soccer player, so when I realized there was beach soccer every day, I got fairly excited, because now I got the chance to prove to people I wasn’t really unathletic. That chance came on the second day after doing our “Cool Runnings Trip” where there was a bunch of Jamaican kids playing soccer and a bunch of grown Jamaican men also playing soccer, so I asked if I could play. They put me on the better team probably thinking that I would not stand a chance, how wrong they were. I scored all of my teams goals as we won the game 4-2. I even pushed one of the Jamaican staff off of the ball, he got pretty mad and you could sort of see he was going after me, so I nutmegged him and that got him quiet quick. Beach soccer was really fun, but once again, nothing could top our final day trip.
My brother ended up getting quite the ear infection on the final 3 days, it spread to both of his ears and he had to go to the hospital, well my mom and my brother were doing that, my dad and I went ziplining, which turned out to be the experience of a life time. We went up almost 900 feet in a car that was literally the most unsafe car ever. The windshield was entirely cracked from things flying into it, there was no windows,no seat belts and we could not all fit into the car so we squeezed in. The ride took anywhere from 10 minutes-3 hours, we all lost track of time, for we were just holding onto things for dear life. In fact, while our driver Douglas was driving up, the ziplining equipment in the front seat flew into the windshield and made a small dent! That was much more scary than what was to come, the ziplining. We started off by him giving us instructions regarding how not to kill yourself well ziplining, basically the only thing I got out of that was do not hold onto the line or your hand will get chopped off.
To start off the start of the ziplining what we did was do a 200 foot across one that was only 20 feet up. I think it was basically to see if anyone had been pushed into doing this and was going to chicken out completely and to my surprise no one in our group of 15 backed out, in fact, almost everyone in our group actually enjoyed it. The feeling that I experienced while ziplining across was amazing, I felt as if that was what flying felt like. The next zipline was quite a trek, we had to walk around a half mile up a hill. The walk itself wasn’t the bad part, it was that it was uphill and we were carrying loads of gear for the ziplining, after completing that walk, we did a few more ziplines where we were a couple hundred feet up and the zipping was about 900 feet long! However, the best part about that trip was the last zipline, our guide said that this was what we had paid for, a quarter mile long zipline that took over 2 minutes to fully go across! At its highpoint we were almost a quarter of a mile above the jungle, once again I felt like this was what it would feel like to fly, except on an entirely new level! As I was coming into land, I saw that there was a Donkey that was sitting directly under the zipline! I tried to move, but I knew there was literally no way I could avoid him unless he moved out of the way. The Jamaican guides just laughed as I pointed! I ended up brushing him and petting him as I flew by to the end of the zip, I came flying in and they asked if I enjoyed seeing the Donkey! Then I laughed even harder as I saw my dad’s face as he also saw the Donkey! All in all, this was one of the most fun few hours of my life! Everyone should try to be as adventurous as they can and as they say in Jamaica, “don’t worry,be happy”!
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