Last Wednesday, we headed out to Jamaica for five days. We had booked a trip at a Sandals in Montego Bay way back in March. We got started early on Wednesday - up at 4:30 am! We were scheduled to fly from Charleston to Atlanta at 7:30 am and then board our flight to Montego Bay at 9:45 am. We got some breakfast at the Charleston airport and boarded the plane, and then the bad news began. There was a bad fog in Atlanta, and they weren't letting any planes land or take off. So we sat on the plane at the gate in Charleston for an hour. We finally made it to Atlanta around 9:30, just in time to sprint to our other plane, which was of course, at the complete opposite end of the airport from where we had landed. After much sprinting and nearly passing out from exhaustion, we arrived at the gate to find that the plane had just left. The next plane was scheduled to leave at 2:45 pm. Needless to say, we were off to a great start. So we roamed around the Atlanta airport for awhile, got some lunch, and settled in at our gate to wait it out. Cy watched an entire movie and I read an entire book. It was almost time to board when one of the other people sitting at the gate with us (who had also missed the earlier plane) receives a cell phone call from her son saying that we were all at the wrong gate - they had switched gates without bothering to let anyone know!!! Sure enough, they finally start flashing some info on the board where we are sitting and it says something about a flight to Vienna! So about 15 of us pack up and start wandering off in search of the new gate which is of course, a fair hike away. So after almost missing our plane a second time, we finally get to the right place, and the plane is delayed!!! We eventually got to board and finally made it to Jamaica around 6 pm Jamaica time (7 pm our time).
When we got to the resort, we encountered our second big disappointment - our resort. It looked nothing like the pictures they used for advertisement. Most importantly, there was no beach! The pictures on the website and the brochure showed a large, beautiful, private beach with sailboats and water sports. In actuality, 95% of the beach had eroded, leaving only a strip of dirty sand a few hundred yards across, no water sports, and heavily populated 24/7 with hoards of rather scary locals. Because, disappointment #3 - the resort not only lacked a beach; it is also in the middle of a very scary part of downtown Montego Bay. Seriously. . .we tried to go for a walk by the water at 7 am our first morning there and a guy walks up to us as soon as we walk out the front door of the hotel and says, "Hey man, want a little smoke?" And we are like, "What? No! And it's 7 o'clock in the morning!" So we keep walking, but a few yards later we see a man who has apparently finished swimming and decides to just strip down and change out of his swim clothes in the middle of the road!!! At that point, we just turned around & went inside, and immediately caught a bus to one of the other Sandals resorts, where there actually was a beach (a really beautiful one), free of nude and/or high locals.
This became the routine for the next few days - have breakfast delivered to the room, eat it out on the balcony, then catch a bus to Sandals Montego Bay. Lie on the beach until lunchtime, then hit up the lunch buffet at the Bayside Restaurant. Around 2:15, we would catch the bus back to Sandals Inn, where we would rest until it was time for dinner. We went to three different restaurants for dinner - the Carlyle (where a local reggae band played while we ate, soon to be followed by an Elvis impersonator, which we did not stick around for), Tokyo Joe's (a Japanese steakhouse where an angry Jamaican chef cooked our food sweating over an open fire), and Cucina Romana, which had delicious Italian food, and where I acquired a billion mosquito bites that I had an allergic reaction to while flying home the next day.
On Saturday, our last full day in Jamaica, we had scheduled a rafting tour on the Martha Brae river. However, when we got up Saturday morning, things quickly went downhill. First, they lost our card with our breakfast order and we never got our breakfast. Then, our front door broke - it wouldn't close or lock, so we couldn't leave our room. Cy tried to explain this to the front desk and they didn't seem to understand. So he eventually just walked down there to yell at them, and while he was there, he was like, could you also please bring us our breakfast? Eventually our breakfast (and later) the maintenance guy showed up. The maintenance guy's solution was to whip out a knife and carve a bigger hole in the door frame so they door would shut. Brilliant. By then we had missed the tour, which they tried to charge us full price for (but Cy would have none of it).
Saturday night was actually the best part of our trip. We went over to Sandals Montego Bay for dinner at Cucina Romana (which was the best food we had all week) and we saw an absolutely gorgeous sunset. So that was a nice end to our rather chaotic trip.
Sunday morning we did some shopping in the airport (they had a reggae CD store and a Jamaica Pirates store!) and then flew home. Apparently we were mere hours ahead of Tropical Storm Fay, which we knew nothing about until our pilot said, "We shouldn't have too much trouble from the tropical storm." It was quite a turbulent ride, and apparently the storm hit Cuba just a couple hours after we flew over Cuba. Even though we had a 4-hour layover in Atlanta before we flew home to Charleston, we were so incredibly happy to be back in the United States. Atlanta Bread Company has never tasted so good. And this will probably be our last trip, because I think poor Cy was scarred for life. Maybe next time we'll just take the days off work but lounge around our own home. :)
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