We’re back from our Barbados holiday adventure. What follows is a day-by-day breakdown of what we did. It’s pretty boring, but I just spent about an hour typing this all out, so you’d better read it.
Wednesday May 28
Our journey began at 3:30 am. We drove to my dad’s house & he took us to the airport. We were cutting it really close after getting through security…last ones on the plane. Phew! Had a quick changeover in Miami, no time to spare. Only had time to grab a quick wrap sandwich from an Au Bon Pain cart. Worst sandwich EVER. The tortilla disintegrated and I hardly ate the thing, even though I was starving. We dozed a little on the plane. Landed in Barbados on schedule & hired a car to take us to the hotel, which was in Holetown in the St James provence.
We stayed at Settlers Beach Hotel in the only 1-bedroom apartment unit on the property. There are 23 other villa-type units and mostly (British) families occupied the other villas. We had a small living room, no tv (fine by me), a full kitchen with stove, oven, fridge, cookware, etc, small bedroom with king size bed, bathroom. Nothing fancy or frilly, but we didn’t want (or need) {and couldn’t afford} such luxuries! We were tired and hungry and made our way into the town (a five minute walk) to the supermarket. We like foreign grocery stores and markets. This place seemed to cater to the locals and British tourists. Bought a few necessities, so we could fix breakfast and lunch at the room every day: Cinna Minis (cinnamon toast crunch, with a different name), bread, peanut butter, jelly {bought local jam because smuckers and decent preserves would’ve cost $8-10 US per jar. Big mistake. Shitty jam!}, spaghetti, sauce, eggs, milk, butter, Hob Nobs, water. Went back and made peanut butter and shitty jam sandwiches and went to the beach for a quick swim. Rollum saw some mongooses (mongeese?) scurrying about the grounds, kinda like the way you’d see squirrels in America. My dad told us they brought in a bunch of mongooses to rid the island of snakes.
The beach was really nice – not too much sand, the beach chairs were put away for the day – but the water was really clear and it wasn’t crowded at all. We showered and went down to the hotel restaurant to redeem our free drink coupons, and were surprised that a little welcome reception was taking place (they had given us a little invite to it, but we didn’t notice it in our welcome packet). As a result, we only got 1 drink each before the reception ended. Damn! The owner lady and another worker came by to talk to us and they were both really nice. The reception lady was kinda shy and we asked her about the alleged green monkeys that roam around Barbados. They had a monkey family on the grounds but they chased them away because they were menacing and bothersome. We never saw any monkeys.
We walked back into town for dinner. There were two small alleyways that contained several restaurants – Indian, Thai, local fare, etc – and we quickly discovered that it was going to be quite expensive to eat in Barbados (kinda figured that, judging by the prices at the grocery and realizing how much it must cost to import all the food onto the island). Some of the restaurant proprietors stood outside and tried to get us to come into their restaurants (they post their menus outside). We tried the Indian place first. Rollum had his first of many Banks beers of the trip (local brewery). It’s cheap and good (the beer, not the Indian restaurant). Retired early and slept long and well. I was glad to have a sort-of full day there, to get settled and adjusted.
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