Legally Bound!: I like to kick, stretch, and kick....I'm Thirty....thirty years old.

Well, eventually it had to happen. I had to leave my 20's behind. For the previous three years my birthday had always coincided with the beginning of finals. This year, without that hanging over our heads, we decided that a tropical local was the only appropriate place to mark this milestone.

So off to Provo we flew.

We booked an oceanfront room with a balcony.

The view was unreal.

The beach was amazing.

But the water was choppy the first couple of days.

But that didn't stop us from putting on our ever-stylish snorkel gear.

And we hit the reef that was 20 yards from our room...and took our first of many underwater pictures.

The reef off the beach was amazing. Yup this is just steps away from our hotel room:

And then there was my birthday. We celebrated with a Delicious Amaretto Cake....did I mention it was delicious?

The next day the wind died down.

And we hopped aboard on all day snorkel tour. I'm on a boat:

We went to a great reef first, where we saw....A REEF SHARK! (photo not found; the shark was too quick for us). Next we to the Salt Cays to do some diving for Conch. The Salt Cays are a really shallow area (1-8ft) that encompasses about 20 sq. miles of the Turks and Caicos.

The Conch shells we (well, not us, we kind of struck out) found. These made up a portion of our delicious beach side lunch.

Next, we went to a deserted island and our Captain made us a fabulous lunch of roast fish, grilled chicken and conch salad, which we ate here:

Next on the trip, we went combing for sea shells here:

Then, after a quick stop at an island to look at some iguanas we went to one more reef for our last snorkel of the day. And guess who showed up? JoJo, the local dolphin.

This wasn't an enclosed "swim with dolphins" kind of encounter. This was Jo Jo, right next to our boat. See, JoJo next to our boat. JoJo swam with us for about 15 minutes until he got bored and swam away.

The next day was Scuba Diving. This is the boat that took us out.

But no pictures were taking of the actual Scuba Diving. We were going too deep for our camera, we went about 40-50 feet. We saw the wall drop off to 7,000 feet and swam over the drop off. (Well, Chad did, I just peered over it). We also saw sea turtles, octupus, eels, and baracuda. It was incredible and Chad and I are hooked. We are now looking for Scuba certification courses.

After Scuba we went back to our beach and spent the rest of the day in the water. The water was clearing up nicely by the end of our trip and we were able to get some really great photos.

Eagle Ray: