Saturday, April 5, 2014

April 4 - Beach Day (allowing Sand Gravity to take effect)

This morning I woke relatively late, 7:00 a.m. local time, and meandered my way out to the deck for breakfast.  Today was a total beach day, mostly spent either in the chairs or swimming in the ocean.  I let the "sand gravity" take full effect  and I hardly took any photos.

My breakfast was slow paced and relaxing.. oatmeal, blue mountain coffee, and a banana.  I spent some time flipping through my bird book looking for the names of some of the birds I had photographed.  I had noticed the groundskeeper had different names for some of the birds (what I would call a "bananaquit" he called a "lionsquit")  My book shows the official names of each of the birds, along with some of the "local names", but even those did not match the names that the groundskeeper had told me.  Still, I managed to get a shot of the Jamaican Oriole he had pointed out to me, though I can't remember the name he had called it.



After breakfast, and sunblock application, we spent a lot of time playing in the water.  We were able to borrow stand-up paddleboards to give those a shot.  The boards are far too short for anyone generally over my height, and they are inflatable (which makes them quite bouncy)  G didn't want to try it, she preferred hanging out on a floaty.


The various vendors passed by all day.  I bought a coconut from the fruit lady, D bought a bottle of orange juice from Tony, our favorite juice guy, and we grabbed some jerk pork for lunch from the jerk pork vendor.  The spicy jerk pork is INCREDIBLY spicy... those red things are scotch bonnet peppers, which make jalapeneos seem cute and precious.


We had a bit of rain pass through late in the afternoon, so I took the opportunity to shower up.   My sister, brother in law, and a couple of my nieces wanted to take a walk before dinner, so we left the hotel and turned left, passing by a number of hotels and markets and checking out places that might be interesting for shopping later.  After our walk, we gathered around the bar area and hung out, playing games and waiting for the dinner tables to be set up.  Needle and King were on shift tonight, so we introduced them to the family and King started teaching my niece how to play dominoes so that she could beat D.  :)

 Friday nights Idle Awhile has live music, so we ordered dinner early enough to have our food just as the music began.  Lobster season is just about over, so I jumped at the chance to have some grilled spiny lobster while I could.


After dinner some people were done in by the sun and headed to bed early.  We grabbed some juice and a bottle of coconut rum for our room and got into a game of cribbage.  I eventually faded and went to bed, and missed out on King coming over to learn how to play cribbage.  Perhaps we'll get him into another game of cards sometime before we head out.



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