Honeymoon, Day 3 (Wednesday)

On Wednesday, we took a ferry to Carriacou. (The map doesn't show the distance between Grenada and Carriacou.) The county of Grenada is made up of the islands of Grenada, Carriacou, and Petit Martinique. Carriacou is smaller and about a tenth as populated as Grenada.



2nd didn't take the motion of the waves too well. When we made it to Carriacou, we bought her some motion sickness medication at the drugstore. Apparently they see this pretty often, because they sold us just a couple pills from the package for only a few cents each! Next, we hired a local taxi/tour driver to give us a tour of the island. (I haven't mentioned yet that taxis/personal tour vans are very common on Grenada. Many hang around the docks where they can pick up tourists debarking for just one day from a cruise ship.) Thomas, our guide, took us all over the island and showed us all the sites.

Thomas told us about the ownership of the island changing from the French to the British. The French used L'Esterre Bay as a harbor, but the British wanted to be different, so they set up their harbor in Hillsborough Bay, where it remains. He showed us the hospital sitting in the hills looking over the town, built away from the town to isolate the diseased. The hospital had a Flamboyant Tree, which we realized at that point was the inspiration for the name of our hotel. Unfortunately, it wasn't in bloom.



Thomas dropped us off at Paradise Beach, in L'Esterre Bay, for lunch and some relaxation. While there, we met a few British tourists. The older couple had vacationed there before, and told us that the ocean was usually much calmer. It seems we caught a bad week for that. Still, we waded in the ocean and had a great time. Time went too quickly, and before we knew it, the time had come to head back to Grenada.

We got back, and it had been a tiring day of traveling, so we stayed in for the night and enjoyed our evening.

Honeymoon, Day 2 (Tuesday)

We started off Tuesday earlier. We got on the road and headed to the south-east shore of the island. The map above is the most detailed map we were able to obtain, and the roads weren't marked. So I'm not too embarrassed to say that we got temporarily lost. But with some help from friendly locals, we got ourselves oriented in the right direction before long!




We went to the nature center/restaurant at La Saggesse Bay. The beach there was incredible! Calm water, soft sand, and few people. After hanging around the beach for a bit, we went for a short nature walk. We quickly came to a tidal marsh and saw blue herons and egrets. A little further and we passed a local farm -- growing, among other things, bananas. As we neared a larger road, we happened upon a nicely kept cricket field. (I failed to mention that we saw the national cricket stadium in St. George's on Monday.) Apparently cricket is a big sport in the Carribean.



After our walk, we headed back to the center for lunch. We had delicious passion fruit juice as we looked out over the bay. Although I'm not a big fish-eater, I really enjoyed the salmon salad. And 2nd liked her fish wrap with plantain chips. And we had a small anole lizard join us! He seemed to enjoy the view, too.



After lunch, we headed up the eastern (Atlantic) coast. The water was rougher on that side, but the views were still great. We headed towards the area of Grenville in search of a hot spring I had heard about through word of mouth. It took some searching and quite a few stops to ask for directions, but again, the locals were very helpful. When we were getting close, one guy even rode with us to help us make the last few difficult-to-find turns. We really wouldn't have found it without him! We had to drive on a very rough and uneven dirt road for some distance. (The one picture we have really doesn't do it justice. There were some difficult stretches of road.) Thank goodness we had a jeep instead of a car!



We headed back to our hotel to clean up. We took the shorter path, which happened to take us through the mountains and rain forest in the center of the island. We would go back on Thursday, so we didn't stop this day. In fact, it was getting close to our dinner reservation time. We went to a nice, fancy place closer to the airport -- the Beach House. I can't remember whether our reservation was for 6 or 6:30, but when we got there we were the only guests yet to arrive. We had this fancy restaurant all to ourselves! We watched the sunset over the beach from our table. I can't overstate how great it was! Eventually, sometime after 7, two other parties arrived. Maybe they just eat later down there, or it was just slow because it was a weekday and not in the main city. But I really expected it to be a busier place, given how great it was. Oh well, I'm not complaining!

Honeymoon, Day 1 (Monday)

2nd already posted some pictures of our honeymoon, but I wanted to put a more detailed summary of our adventures, since not everyone has heard all of our stories yet.

For our honeymoon, we went to Grenada (the island in the Caribbean, not the city in Spain). We got a lot of odd reactions on telling people about our plans. Most people older than us asked if that was where the US had invaded in the early '80s. Yup. In October of 1983, a communist coup killed the head of the government. The US invaded six days into the coup, allegedly at the request of the Governor-General, and the government of Dominica. However, all of the travel guides indicated that Grenada is safe and friendly to Americans these days. And although it was hit hard by hurricane Ivan in 2004, Grenada is widely reported to be recovering rapidly.

Grenada is referred to as the Spice Island. They are the largest producer of nutmeg in the world -- they even have a nutmeg on their national flag -- but they also grow many other spices. We decided it would be a good place to soak up culture and food in addition to the beaches.

It took a little bit of traveling to get there. First, we flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico. From there, we changed carriers and took a prop plane to St. Vincent, which had a tiny, tiny airport. Then, we connected to Grenada. We arrived late Sunday night, and, after the local who rented us our jeep for the week crazily drove us to our hotel (little did we know, everybody on the island would be driving crazily!), we checked in for the night.


We decided to sleep in a bit on Monday. We eventually got up and checked out our view from our balcony!

If you look closely, you can see a pair of cruise ships across the beach -- that's St. George's, the capital of Grenada. From our hotel, we could see straight in to St. George's harbor. Incidentally, that would be our first stop.



We headed into town and walked along the harbor. The road and sidewalk were only a few feet above sea level, and waves occasionally splashed up on them. While in town, we booked our ferry tickets to Carriacou, a smaller island to the north, still part of the nation of Grenada. More about that trip on Day 3. We checked out the local shops, and we gathered ideas for where we wanted to eat and what we wanted to do with our week.

We spent a good part of the day exploring around the streets and shops, and we stumbled upon a good place for lunch -- it looked more like a home than a restaurant! We had some nice fried chicken. (More chickens were just wandering around the street.) We also had a great lime-squash drink!



Then we visited Fort George. This is where the coup and assassination took place. Strangely enough, that was the first time a shot was ever fired at the fort.



Late in the afternoon, we headed back to our hotel and Grand Anse Beach, the most popular beach on Grenada. And would you believe we had it all to ourselves! It was just downhill of our hotel room.

In the evening, we headed out for dinner. I can't remember the name of the restaurant we ate at, but we had a nice banana split for dessert, with a local twist. Nutmeg ice cream!

Ears first -- that's the rule

2nd and I spent Easter Sunday with 2nd's family. There was no Easter egg hunt, nor Easter baskets...but there was an Easter bag hunt! However, since other guests had not yet arrived, 2nd's youngest sister, 5thof5, had to let us know which bag was intended for us. Naturally, we found that one only after we had found every other bag.

Fortunately, our bag did contain the traditional chocolate bunny. I thought no one was looking, but I guess 2nd managed to get a candid shot of me digging in:


It was Sunday night before 2nd and I realized we had failed to obtain another staple of the holiday, Cadbury Cream Eggs. This would not do. So on Monday, 2nd grabbed some at the store, and Easter was saved. She even hid them for me. Joy!

Phone pas

I wanted to share a little something I found funny.

I'm sure anyone out there who sends text messages with any frequency is aware that the phone can give you the wrong word, particularly when the word is short. For example, every time I try to type "home" (4-6-6-3), it instead places the word "good" into the message. So if I try to tell 2nd that she might "beat me home," I have to make sure I don't accidentally send her a message saying that she will "beat me good."

But I've been witness to a more disconcerting substitution in the past few weeks. When I want to refer to 2nd as "wife" (9-4-3-3), it will instead place in a word no husband should ever call his wife. Or any woman for that matter. The consequences would be grim indeed. You see, 9-4-3-3 spells "wide."