Today's Reverb 10 prompt:
December 3 – Moment.
Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
(Author: Ali Edwards)
Funnily enough, I think the moments that I felt the most alive were the very first of the year.
When the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, Shaun and I were in Cuba. We had gone down for Christmas, staying at a gorgeous 5-star resort. We had spent the last five days lying by the pool, talking, reading books, taking naps, eating calamari, and drinking mojitos. It was basically my dream vacation. It was also our first sun vacation ever, so everything felt like a beautiful revelation: you mean we don’t have to trek around the city and try to muster enthusiasm for our 4th museum of the week? You mean they’ll bring us beer after beer, for just a few pesos in tips? You mean I really don’t have to do anything but lie here? You mean the pool has a bar that I can SWIM to? You mean these pina coladas DON’T have any calories?
Okay, that last one might have just been a lie I told myself, but still: it was a wonderful vacation.
New Year’s Eve was our last full day there. The resort hosted a huge buffet lunch down on the beach. We sat with our new friends, two sisters from Calgary, and we ate hamburgers and drank cold mojitos, pushing our cups into the sand between sips. We stayed for hours, just watching the ocean and feeling the breeze, knowing tomorrow we’d be leaving.
Dinner was to be a fancier affair. We went back to our rooms, napped, showered and went to our 8 o’clock reservation. We had steak, lobster tails, more wine than I can remember. They gave us champagne, glass after glass, and they gave us noisemakers and masquerade-style masks. After dinner we met the sisters in the lobby bar for more drinks and mingling, and then we joined the party outside.
In front of the resort they had set up a band-stand. A Cuban group was playing music, and they had costumed dancers working their way through the crowds. I’d say most of the guests were out there, dancing away, everyone dressed in their ‘resort finest’. We were all stuffed from dinner, happy from champagne. Shaun and I almost never go dancing – we are not the type – but we danced that night. The resort was mostly older people – I’d say the average age was 50 – and everyone seemed so care-free, and I think Shaun and I are secretly a 60-year-old couple anyway, and so we just fell right into it. At midnight we all counted down, and then we toasted, and then I got to kiss the person I love the most in the world, and then we danced to Auld Lang Syne. I have always loved that song, regardless, but it was truly one of the most perfect moments of my life. Those first couple minutes of 2010, I felt very much alive, and very much myself.
My only regret from the evening is that I have no pictures. But I dug this one up of one of our days at the pool.
Of course, even as I was typing this out I was hitting up travel websites. I would love to go back there again this winter, if finances allow. I think I'm totally meant for resort vacations.
Have you ever been on a sun trip? Is it seriously like the best thing ever?
