Monday, September 03, 2007

I'm back...

Sigh....

Okay, there's the obligatory big sigh. Jamaica is a lovely place, but then again, so is every place in the Caribbean. The Holiday Inn SunSpree Resort was very nice. It has a lot of beach and a little lagoon (although not as cool a lagoon as the late lamented Paradise Island Fun Club), three restaurants, a beach bar and grill and a buffet for every meal (Steven loved that he could eat anything almost anytime he wanted). The food was not top-notch, but it was good.
Buffet - breakfast.


The room was nice and comfortable and had a little balcony.

We had a lovely view of the East Beach - and the "family pool".


We got off the resort one day and went to Dunn's River Falls and a "park" called Dolphin Cove in Ocho Rios. It has dolphins, sharks and sting rays in a lagoon built for them and other animals in the forest around the beach. They have the now obligatory pirates and that sort of thing, too. The FallsThe picture says "We survived the world's famous Dunn's River Falls", but I didn't. I fell once before this picture was taken and once after - then I bailed out and climbed up to the steps that went down to the beach. I stayed there awhile and got some shells and stones to bring home and then climbed the steps to the exit where I waited for Steven to finish. He made it up the 600 foot climb, but he slipped a couple of times.

Here we are with the macaws. I loved the green one.

Steven swam with the rays.

I took pictures of the sharks and dolphins while I was waiting. After that, we had a "touch encounter" with a Mexican dolphin named Shuggie.


Here I am with her.


These are pictures of the other animals - the burro was right at the front - a guy trying to make a living with the burro...The goats were in a pen - there's a female and the obvious male(!!!!). There were two iguanas and the snake, which you can barely see on the branch.

We also saw the shark show. The pirates took a "victim" who had signed up to swim with the sharks and got her to hold a shark, like they did.This was the cute pirate (IMHO, of course).

We had dinner at a beach barbeque on the East Beach and got photos of the last sunset in Jamaica (ours, at least).

We also bet on a crab race after the barbeque.

Was a shade off - we bet on blue and green won.

The sunsets are beautiful, but are hard to catch. One minute, the sun's out, next minute, it could be gone. But this sunset lasted a while and I got a nice picture of it - a lot of pictures, actually.


We did a lot of things - like Steven won $7000 playing Bingo; I won a "bong" filled with a Mango Margarita from Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville by shaking my booty; I sang "Amazing Grace" to about 150+ people in a talent show (no prizes there, but I did get a compliment on my singing and for me, that was a prize!); I got $1000 in a trivia game; we went on a glass bottomed boat and Steven went snorkeling (I stayed on board - after nearly losing my life vest and my mask last year - no snorkeling for me); we went on a mini boat at Dolphin Cove (forgot that one earlier) and Steven got to drive it - that was exciting; and last, but not least, we got bumped from the straight to Newark flight and came home through Houston, so that we got home at midnight. We called Elysha and she and Robbie picked us up and cancelled the limo we had scheduled. I ran all around the airport because I had bought a few tiny bottles of odd liquors at a duty-free shop and couldn't take them outside the departure area. I had to leave them in the customs office and go back for them once we had been reticketed. But we did get $700 in flight vouchers. :-) So it didn't seem so bad after all.

We also somehow got by with not paying a departure fee - as is seen on the yellow sign by the ticket booth where we were reticketed - inside the airport, where, yes, you can take pictures...


Jamaica - no problem!

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