Monday, August 19, 2013

Honeymoon Day #7: July 7th

     Yesterday I woke up at 9 but it took us three hours to get out of the hotel. I made eggs for breakfast. I talked to Hance for a while about good places to go snorkeling. Turns out there aren't really any right off the land - well, Dean's Blue Hole was good, and I think the northernmost tip of the island but we'd already been up there - so he gave us some good beach ideas.

Tuesday, July 9th, ~9:30 am
     I just dragged myself out of bed because I feel like we shouldn't waste time today and tomorrow because they're our last days on the island. But I'm too lazy to really get ready so I'll write because that's still productive.
     So on Sunday we set out at almost 12:30 for the north end. I feel like we stopped somewhere...oh! we drove out to Chez Pierre, in Millers or Millerton, I wasn't sure which. It's supposed to be the best restaurant on the island according to our visitors' guide, so I'd called them a couple times trying to make a reservation for Wednesday evening but nobody answered so we saw the sign and just decided to go check it out and if they were open, just have lunch there then. The road was another one of those super bumpy dirt tracks, which I was surprised at because I thought it was supposed to be this fancy place. It was a long road too. And when we finally got there...they were closed! It's a hotel too, and the whole place was deserted. Grrr. You'd think they could put something on their voicemail or on their sign by the main road. They actually didn't even have a real voicemail though, just the "the subscriber you are trying to reach is not available" thing. Weird.
     Anyway, we looked at the beach, which was lovely. I contemplated stealing a conch shell but decided not to. We would've stayed for a while but Mark was getting hungry. So we bumped back out and continued north until we ran into the Beach Bungalow restaurant. Once again we were the only people there except for the cook and her two little girls. The place was lovely though, with a big deck overlooking the water. It was on Deals Beach. 





     As we waited for our food the TV started reporting on a huge plane crash at SFO which immediately had me riveted. Flight 214 from Asiana Airlines crashed as it was landing. It's totally crazy. I was all "of course we had to end up here, with a TV, I couldn't have waited until we got back to hear about this." Since then we've seen video of the crash and it just looks crazy. 305 of the 307 passengers survived though. As far as I know. I don't know if any of them have since died in the hospital.
     Anyway, the owner of the place showed up and talked to us for a while and then sat down for lunch with his son. Our lunch came, which was really good. He got a regular burger & fries, and I got a fish burger and fries. I think so far our best meals have been here at Gems, at the Outer Edge, Beach Bungalow and Max's Conch Bar & Grill. Everything's a bar & grill around here.
     Anyway, we ate, took some pictures, and headed out. We were stopped a little further up the road gathering our stuff to go snorkeling when Omar drove by and stopped to see if everything was okay. We asked him if he knew of any good snorkeling spots nearby and he thought for a minute and then took us back south a few minutes and we parked in what looked like the parking lot of an abandoned school or youth center. He told us to grab all our stuff and lead us to a path through the woods. At first we couldn't even tell where he was going - we couldn't see any break in the bushes. He said this is where the Stella Maris Resort people get dropped off because they don't have a beach. He told us to just follow the path to the beach and there'd be an island we could snorkel around. Sure enough, after a few minutes we emerged on another beautiful, deserted beach and found the island, which took us a minute because it was kind of around the corner. We snorkeled for about 45 minutes. The most notable thing we saw was a big starfish - like the size of a serving platter. Once again wished we had an underwater camera. The sand underwater was really mucky and squishy feeling, it was weird. It looked the same.
     Anyway, then we laid out for a while, took some pictures, looked for a good conch shell but didn't find any pretty ones, and headed back.


     We ate leftover mutton for dinner and watched a bootleg copy of The Call, which we're going to have to download when we get home because the end skipped so bad we missed some chunks. Not good for such a suspenseful movie!

Friday, August 9, 2013

Honeymoon Day #6: July 6th

     On Saturday we had breakfast at Rowdy Boys. We got cinnamon french toast. It was yummy :) Then we came back and tried to nap/read. We napped a little and then we went to the house of Leonard Cartwright for a tour of Hamilton Caves. He was really nice.

Mark and Leonard, ready to go

     He gave us lamps and the cave was scary but cool. Absolutely no development whatsoever. He owns the land - it's been in his family for like 170 years, and he's been playing in the caves since he was a little kid. There were lots of bats and he showed us a couple cockroaches in the beginning, which had Mark freaked out for the rest of the time. I was more scared of the bats.


     Some places were really dark but some places had light from the outside.



     There were some carvings his brother had done.


Up until about 10 years ago they used it as a hurricane shelter.

People would sit around the edges during hurricanes

     Mark took lots of pictures. After that we tried to find Grays Plantation (ruins) but couldn't. We ended up taking a road out to the ocean side of the island that dead ended at a half-built house (lots of those too) so we walked down the path to get as close to the water as we could (we were up on a hill) and took pictures.

Goats!



     There were a bunch of goats. Lots of goats here. We headed back to the hotel because we had dinner reservations and wanted to snack on cheese, summer sausage and crackers first. Dinner was very good - we had told Sandy we wanted to try mutton (or Hance, probably, he's the one who's always around) so he had let us know (Hance) that she got some. She served it with rice and coleslaw, which normally I wouldn't have chosen but it all went very well together. 


Mmmmm, mutton

      I ended up with lots of leftovers, which I ate last night. They were delicious. Turns out the mutton was sheep. (I guess it can be goat too) After dinner we watched two episodes of My Cat From Hell on Animal Planet and played Connect Four. :)