Barbuda Day 4… Last Full Day

Well,  we woke up this morning to the clearest water we saw all week.

 So the snorkeling was on!

There were some grass beds, but most of the dark spots you see are live coral. This is the most coral I've ever seen. Bailley and I snorkeled most of the morning and saw lots of fish.

Cindy and Bailley spent some time making our last sandcastle while Abigail 'supervised'. 

We tried to arrange a boat to the great frigate bird sanctuary while we drove into town for lunch. We actually ate street food cooked on a grill under a tent (how exciting :). Afterwards we ended up just driving back down the coast to the cottage as Bailley had developed a rash and Madison (noticeably absent from the above shots) has enough sand fly bites for this adventure.

Barbuda… the Mayberry of the Caribbean :)

Barbuda Day 3

Today we had our Thanksgiving lunch. It was good. Two things different from our typical holiday meal... We had a chilled sorrel drink, which they only have now and Christmas, and Johnny cakes. We then drove to the other side of the island.

Here you can see the caves that the Arawak Indians used as shelter. 

This is straight up Atlantic Ocean, just beautiful, clear, and _very_ rough.

Here's everyone with Two Foot Bay, just past the caves, as our background.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. We are so lucky and thankful for so much!

Jim

Barbuda Day 1 and 2

OK… our first full day on Barbuda. Looked a lot like the pic below.

Just miles of deserted beach. Like really miles. I was going to walk to Palmetto point off in the distance. I walked for what felt like an hour and wasn't even to the Pink Sand beach or ferry landing which appeared like the half way point.

Lunch was at Uncle Roddy's which is next door. Nice and convenient, we just have to order a day in advance so that he knows what to buy and cook. This is us before the massive fly attack on the lobster.

Yeah… it's stressful.

 Like I mentioned, there's a beach north of us with pink sand. It actually was way more pink than I expected, especially the sections of shells left in patterns by the waves. The surf was really rough, so we left to drive into town. We were told Codrington has only one road, and it's impossible to get lost… well, we did the impossible :)  We drove through that small town _a lot_.

We stopped for lunch at The Palm Restaurant… it was very good and reasonable priced. The girls made reservations for Thanksgiving lunch there.

I think we are going to try for a family picture tonight before dinner at Uncle Roddy's. The internet just came back to us today, so posting is very hit or miss. I hope everyone is well and has a great Thanksgiving in case we can't get anything sent tomorrow.

Jim

Antigua-Barbuda Travel Day

Today was the last day in Antigua as we traveled to Barbuda. Today was quite an adventure… yes, even more so than our first day. Cindy found a rainforest canopy tour and wanted to do it. I'm not sure she knew it was a zip line tour from her hesitancy off the first platform. It also took me a couple of lines to warm up to it, but we all had a blast!

Then on to buy groceries, _try_ to find snorkeling gear to rent, and to the airport. I was told the plane was a small prop plane… hey, that's not _that_ small...

 cause it wasn't our plane. Our plane was on down the taxiway. The pilot and 7 of us filled that that thing to the brim. It was a nice flight, but I was very happy to be back on the ground.

Then a long taxi ride to the middle of nowhere… our cottage :) This is the view off the porch.

 And nothing but miles of deserted beach.

Well… we are here. So not a lot in store now but rest and relaxation for the next few days.

Antigua Day 2

 OK… Our first full day in Antigua. We went to the beach at the resort at Nonsuch Bay and just relaxed. That doesn't mean that there wasn't an awesome display of sandcastle building.

We then retired to one of the pools, just below our rental.

We decided to do something more local for lunch and see another beach too. Here are me and Cindy at Smiling Harry's. The fish and chicken and peas and rice were really good and we ate a lot… didn't stop Harry from critiquing how much each of us ate or didn't eat :)

Here's the beach at Half Moon Bay. Just stunningly beautiful… the girls *and* the beach. It is on the Atlantic side, so the waves were pretty large.

And finally… a sunset from our balcony… not too shabby.

Antigua-Barbuda Travel Day 1 and 2

Well… this Thanksgiving we decided to go to Antigua-Barbuda. We decided to stay in Antigua first, then make our way to Barbuda.

First things first… grabbing a quick Schlotsky's sandwich before our flight to Atlanta.

Atlanta, for an overnight stay…what? Unlike our original tickets we bought from Delta, our newly changed tickets had a night layover in Atlanta. Thank you Delta (NOT).

What'll ya have? We had to hit the Varsity in the airport. I wanted to take Abigail, our Chick-fil-A fanatic, to the Dwarf House… but we got to the hotel late and it was cold and rainy, so we decided against it.

Two days in and we finally see the Caribbean Sea. The airport immigration took well over an hour (a British Airways 777 landed just before us). But what really took so long was the drive to the resort. Man… right hand drive car, left side of the road, at night, no roadsigns, minimally useful maps, did I mention gravel roads?… the 30-45 minute drive took _well_ over an hour. I made more wrong turns than right for sure. But we made finally made it… had a nice dinner at the resort, and hit the beds.

20th Anniversary Getaway

  I surprised Cindy with a quick getaway to Las Vegas for our 20th wedding anniversary.  The girls (and my parents) and I did a nice job of keeping the secret all the way until the day of travel.  Cindy was surprised, yet had time enough to pack to her liking.  I flew my parents in to watch the kids... it was so well timed, we met my parents crossing at the airport and passed off our vehicle for them to use.

  Me and Cindy getting waiting to leave at the airport.

  Here's Cindy going through the casino to get to our room... every route is 'through the casino' as everyone knows. This is MGM Grand where we stayed, but it could of been 1 of N where N is a large number of casinos. No windows, no clocks, it all looked pretty much the same no matter what hour you were there. I don't know about pumped in oxygen to keep you awake, but it was very well ventilated and they did pump in various fragrances which probably helped everyone stay awake.

  Man... if there is one thing that I didn't realize before actually getting to Las Vegas was the scale of the place. The Hoover Dam tour guide (driver, not the people at the dam) gave us a lot of interesting information about Las Vegas (as well as profusely using the obligatory 'dam jokes'... which never really got old). The 'strip', Las Vegas Blvd, is over 5 miles long. When you look at a map, walking from the MGM to the Bellagio is 2-3 hotels apart. That's almost a mile... then the casinos are all set back a few hundred yards off the strip, so the 'necessary' stops along the way make it more of a hike than you think at first glance at a map.

  If you walk through the casinos, by the restaurants and shops just at the MGM resort in one loop it is over 1 mile. We went to the concierge to ask something and I commented on the size of the hotel... the lady looked puzzled that I didn't know that it's one of the largest hotels in the world... and for quite a while it was #1. How large is that? In one structure, over 5,000 rooms. All total, over 7,000 rooms on property in multiple buildings. Where does that put them now? 2 or 3 depending on the way you count rooms. Caesar's Palace has 7,000 in one structure and the Venetian has around 8,000. In fact, 8 of the top ten largest hotels are in Las Vegas on the strip.

   First step... put in 20$... next step... take out 100$. It's GO time lucky Cindy! And yeah... no more clinking of payout coins except through a speaker... it's all printed vouchers.

   Geeky I know, but I drug Cindy on a tour of the Hoover Dam. It was awesome! Oh yeah, I'm a geek, so makes sense. Here I am in the power station, approximately 525 feet down. The upper left windows above the generators are about 3 feet above the water line on the dam output side.

  Here's Cindy on the dam with the new, Pat Tillman bridge as a backdrop. You can still drive over the dam, but you immediately are forced to turn around and come back. The dam was really high... but I swear, it felt like the bridge was another 500 feet above you. There are people walking across the bridge that you cannot even see in the picture.

   Tough to get a good picture with the dam... just too big. And after all the food, I may run into the same issue.

  Hey, I found a use for the panorama feature... I love this pic of Cindy and the strip. You can see the green MGM on the right all the way to the Eiffel Tower at Paris on the left.

  Oh yeah... black... jack! I'm glad Cindy quickly snapped this... it (black jack or even winning for that matter) didn't happen much for me.

   As far as food, we ate at MGM's buffet for breakfast and it was not your typical buffet food... it was very good food... and they had about half an acre of unique items. Try not over indulging... very difficult. The sit-down food was even better. I made reservations at Scarpetta in the Cosmopolitan for our anniversary dinner and we had a table overlooking the fountains at the Bellagio. The food was some of the best I've ever had. After dinner dessert was at Sugar Factory. The s'mores crepe while watching the fountains did not disappoint either.
  We attended one show, Cirque du Soleil "O". The show was fantastic. Some of the acts were just unbelievable. Even the set was awesome to see as it moved and changed, for a geek it was the show within the show.

   Well... at some point we started putting in 20.00$ and getting 0.04$ back :)  But as the dam tour guy said... there are no losers, just winners and investors. He pointed out that all those palm trees lining the strip? They are not indigenous and are brought in from all around the world. Let's just say we made our own small investment in the casinos this trip. Maybe we'll go back one day and see if we can get a little ROI.


  I think the first sign (that I'll mention on a family blog) we noticed at the Las Vegas airport was for a Buffet of Buffets. That general idea summed up almost every over-the-top aspect of Las Vegas, food or otherwise. What a fun trip!