St Lucia, West Indies

Our trip to St Lucia was a good one...

The airport sits on the far end of the island from where many of the resorts lie. It's about an hour ride via shuttle, but if you get queasy from car rides, this is not the place for you. They were hit pretty hard by a hurricane last fall, and as a result, many of the roads have crumbled down the cliffs in to the jungle. There were some points that I thought we were going off the side.

The island is stricken with poverty. Even my kids noticed how many of the people live in shacks. This is common with Caribbean islands, but I don't really like to be reminded that others live this way when I'm on vacation. It sounds callous and selfish, but it makes it really hard to enjoy yourself, knowing the staff are probably underpaid and will never know what it's like to enjoy a trip like you are on.

The Atlantic side of the island is beautiful, but not really a great place to vacation if you enjoy the beach. It reminds me of the coastline of California..beautiful mountains but not beach-worthy. The Caribbean side of the island is where the majority of the people live and the resort are.

The island operates with the Eastern Caribbean Dollar, which is roughly $1 US Dollar to $2.70 ECs. The drinks are reasonable...about $6/drink...but the food is RIDICULOUSLY priced, and at the Windjammer Landing, where we stayed, it was just so-so. The resort is beautiful, but I was not a fan of the beach. The sand is rocky and dirty. The staff was very warm and welcoming...most of the veteran staff remembered my MIL from her 11 years going there. Its a timeshare resort, which is a nice option. We own the Disney Vacation Club, and personally, I think its a better option for timeshare, but everyone has their own opinions of what they like. I am by no means putting the place down...we had a great time.

The villa was very nice and relaxing. We spent most of our time there. I like the option in having your private pool.

All in all, I would go back to St Lucia, but it's not somewhere I would go on a cruise ship stop. I would be more inclined to try some different islands, rather than rush back there right away. I loved Costa Maya, Mexico...but with the violence in Mexico, I would be worried about traveling there right now. If you are looking for a relaxing place to lounge, St Lucia was lovely...if you like to be more active, I would go somewhere else.

The view from our villa.

Our glorious porch, where I could happily live forever.

The view off the side of our pool.

My handsome son Gavin.

The debonair Taylor.

The open-air lobby.

The pool.

This ship was AMAZING.

How could anyone not like this?

Greetings from St Lucia!!

Well, we got in to St Lucia around 2:30pm local time here, which is an hour ahead of eastern time, but then we had a hellish almost 2 hour drive from one side of the mountain to the other. Then when we finally got here, they had given away the villa to someone else!!! So, we inhaled several complimentary rum punches, as they straightened out the mess. We finally got up to the villa, got stuff settled and then went to eat dinner. When we got back, it was like 10pm, so we took showers and went to bed. We were exhausted from getting up at 3am Sunday morning to leave.

The island is pretty ghetto, and I was getting kind of worried about our accomodations, but the resort sits in a bay, and I guess most of the big resorts are all at the north end of the island. When you drive in to the resort, its like a whole different world. Really lush and green, our villa sits up on a mountain. We are REALLY high up. So high, we can't hear the ocean. But we have a pretty awesome view, and can even see the Grenadines in the distance. The whole island is mountainous, and volcanic.

The villa is open air during the day, and the breezes are WONDERFUL! No humidity at all. Its a white stucco villa with spanish red tile roof, and tiled floors. We have little birds flying in, and Gavin hand fed a little finch this morning. I woke up before anyone else and stepped out on our balcony. Then I decided to go downstairs and out on the private porch and lay there on the couch, just looking at the ocean and feeling the breeze. We have a pool too...which the kids have enjoyed.

I really had to motivate myself to turn on the computer, but I will try to be good about communicating this week, although maybe not as good as I thought!!! We are relaxed and enjoying life (and the frozen concoctions, such as the Mango Crush I've been enjoying.)Now if this place came with a mute button for my kids, I would never leave!!!

I will try to get some pictures out after I take more. Today, we've just been lazy as hell and loving EVERY minute.



Keri

The Unlikely Skier

So I was kind of busy over the weekend. We went skiing with Andy’s dad and stepmom up in Canada at a place called Blue Mountain Resort, Ontario, Canada. See link: http://www.bluemountain.ca/

Let me start by saying that I have only ever skied once in my life, and that was last February. Andy came home on mid-tour R&R and we went to Lake Placid for a long weekend. I wasn’t really scared to ski because I didn’t know what to be afraid of, other than falling. The first 5 minutes on my skiis cured me of that, as I tried to go down a little bump and fell immediately upon walking outside. It was then that I realized that Andy hadn’t told me how to get back up again, and there I sat, stuck on the ground while he was in the building trading Taylor’s snowboard for skiis. (He couldn’t even stand up with the snowboard.) Gavin came over to me, and after he proceeded to mock me (BRAT), he told me to get on my knees and stand up. Well, since I didn’t know any other better way to do it, and taking my skiis off hadn’t occurred to me at the time, I did just that. By the end of the day, my knees were so wrenched from turning them to the sides to get up, I could barely walk.

I was terrified most this weekend of meeting with my old nemesis… the ski lift. Last time, I didn’t even think I was going to have a problem getting on and off the ski lift. It looks so easy and graceful! You squat and sit, and then get off, right?? Uh, no bitch. That’s only in the movies. First, they had this little ramp you had to ski down right when it was your turn to get on the lift chair…so you have to move quickly. But then you have to stop on a dime, or you’ll keep going right off the platform!!! Every time we went down this little ramp, Taylor fell, so the operator had to keep stopping the whole damn thing until we could situate ourselves.

Escalator!

Then we get to the top, and EVERY DAMN TIME I thought I was home-free getting off, and then the back of my skiis would get tangled with Taylor and I would biff it. After doing this like 10 times, I lost my mind at Andy, who grew up skiing, and made him take Taylor with him. That was much better. But this was the one thing that stuck in my mind as we approached this year’s trip. One interesting twist to this year’s trip was that last Tuesday, Andy sprained his ankle. I mean, size of a grapefruit! But we got off lucky. We didn’t ski very long, because Andy’s stepmom has asthma and his dad has a bad back, so it was only a few hours Friday night and a few Saturday.

I would have to say my highlight was that the bunny hills had flat escalators, like at the airport, that took you up the hills, so I didn’t have to maneuver the ski lifts. I think that the world should have escalators all over the place instead of sidewalks. I just wanted to throw that in since it was relevant and I may not ever have an opportunity to mention it in my blog again. It was worth the almost 9 hour drive from Watertown. I didn’t realize that we were driving that far. I thought it was near Toronto, but the way my inlaws took us, it was 6 hours from their house. It’s right on Georgian Bay, which is part of Lake Huron.

The bad part of this years’ trip was when I let them convince me that a normal size hill just looked bigger because of where we were standing, and that it was no more steep than the bunny hill. So up to the top we went (On a normal ski lift, in which I managed to remain upright). It looked like a bunny hill for the first 50 feet, and then it dropped off in which I can only describe as a sheer cliff, before leveling out again. Now I don’t know if they got a lot of snow right before we went, or what, but this didn’t look like anything we should be going down at our current skill level.  Had I stopped panicking for 5 minutes and turned to my right, I would’ve seen the “sissy escape path” that went down to the bunny hill, however I didn’t notice this until several black and blue marks, two wrenched knees and a heart attack later.

Me walking down the death hill, PISSED!

I started to ski down the hill, then lost my confidence and fell. Andy thought it would be a good idea to come over to “help” me, by telling me to get up. Now, I tend to get a little bitchy when people feel the need to state the obvious. It insults me to the highest level to have someone tell me something my dog could figure out. “DUH…I need to get up. BUT I CAN’T, YOU ASSHOLE!!!!! So unless you have a crane or a hula hoop (I saw a parent doing this with a child) that you can drag me down behind you, then screw off and leave me alone to figure out what the hell I’m going to do!!” I also want to mention that I had no idea where my children were at this point. As far as I was concerned, they were on their own. I realize now that this was not the best display of parenting skills, but I figured that between Andy and his parents, they could deal with how to get the boys down.

Somehow I managed to get up and get going again, but as I approached the cliff, I panicked, and the next thing I knew, I was falling backwards and my legs were flailing around, bouncing off the mountain because my skis were still attached. I remember muttering, “oh shit” and then closed my eyes until I came to a complete stop. You would think after a fall like this, I wouldn’t have much further to go, but NO…I think I had only fallen about 15 feet and I was still above the cliff, only now, my legs were bent in opposite directions at the knees and I couldn’t move them because my skis were too heavy at that angle. I had to punch the bindings several times to release the skis, and then I picked them up and proceeded to carry them all the way down the hill, which proved to be almost as bad as skiing down it. When I reached the bottom, I was pretty pissed with everyone and myself, so I went to have a drink so I could cool off. I was in a lot of pain, and I didn’t understand why I felt no control of my legs, so I went and had my boots checked. Turned out, I was wearing a whole size too big, and my skis were too big too. After I got this changed out, I was fine the rest of the day and even did a little night skiing because I was having fun, and also because I went shopping while we were there and spend $500 on a new ski outfit and felt guilty. So now we are going to be stuck going skiing every year until I feel that I have used the outfit enough to justify the expense.

The moral of the story, is that I will not let anyone peer pressure me in to skiing down a bigger hill. I have fun on the bunny hills, so why is it necessary to force myself to go bigger? I am too old to become an Olympic athlete, so what does it matter? I was so tired each night that I didn’t even have the energy to drink any wine that I had brought, and I came home with a black and blue mark on each shin, the size of a fist. I am so glad it’s over.