I've got to find my way back, back to summer paradise - Nov 2011 Trip Report

Great report, glad to hear you are enjoying the subs!

Anxiously awaiting more! I'm almost at the 4 week stage now before we leave, so your reports are helping me cope. Great pictures too!!

I love your writing - I'm laughing about the packing. Three weeks to go and I started today. I know I'll change things at least 20 more times! Every trip I say "Next time I won't bring soo much" but it never works :)

I realize at this point that I have managed to eat nothing more than a yogurt today. The drinks were going straight to my head and the sub wasn't helping. Tim Horton's to the rescue, as I hadn't actually eaten my biscuit that morning. Eating Tim's in paradise struck me as funny, so I got Sunshine's help to capture the moment.

http://i1327.photobucket.com/albums/...1/IMG_1087.jpg

Somewhat to my dismay, we discovered when we arrived that the restaurant at the hotel was closed because it was low season. The reviews had all said it wasn't very good, but I have to admit, I was kind of counting on being able to get some food without having to venture away from the hotel that first night. Having only just finished breakfast and skipped lunch, we do need to find food. I seriously contemplated just starving.

Instead, we decide to head down to the beach and actually put our feet in the water. This may sound nuts, but I just felt safer and more comfortable exploring the beach under the cover of a bit of darkness.

So we wander out, another drink in hand. The sand is soft and still warm from the sun and the water is the perfect temperature. We share a bit of a smooch and hear a call from not far behind us. It is the Rasta we dealt with earlier. He invites us next door to share a sub with him. We tell him we aren't buying and he says it isn't business, just a sub amongst friends. Seemed a sure sign we had seriously overpaid. So a mere hours after arriving I find myself on the beach, sharing a sub with a Rasta man.

The whole thing felt surreal and at that moment I truly felt how far we had come. I did eventually figure out he was trying to sell us a farm tour for later in the trip, but it still didn't detract from that moment. We said our good-byes to our new Rasta friend and wandered back to our beach.

"Sunshine, we aren't in Kansas anymore," I said. He just smiled a contented smile back.

Now I am really hungry. I am not very good at being hungry. If fact, if you ever meet me and I seem to be more of a b*tch than you would have guessed, I am probably just hungry. My father is the same way. My mother has carried candy in her purse all my life, so when he starts to lose his cool, she can spike is blood sugar to a friendlier level. I didn't have any candy.

I have put this off as long as possible and probably longer than is actually wise. I'm several drinks and a couple of subs into the evening. I haven't slept in three days, and I now I need to find food.

Traveling with all our cash seemed foolish, so we pull out what seems like a fortune in $JA and lock the rest in our room safe. You know I have done my research, so I decide that we will turn right on the road and stop at the first place whose name I recognize. We hadn't walked long when I see Sweet Spot across the road. Perfect, I thought; this was on my list of places serving real Jamaican food and I believe they do take away. We cross the road and head in.

Every country seems to have their own protocol for the order in which one arrives, greats, sits, orders and pays at restaurants. As our first stop, I was clueless as to what we might do. It wasn't that busy, as it was already after eight o'clock.

The women behind the counter says something quickly, I miss it completely. Third time repeating really slowly, we get that she mostly just asking what we would like.
We order up friend chicken and curried shrimp, both with rice and peas and a couple of red stripes while we wait. Time to pay. Since we seem to not be communicating well, she writes the price down. Think it was $2300JA for the meal. No problem, we pull out our cash and start counting.

Uh oh, small problem. We've only $2100 between the two us. Seriously, when I lived in Europe and before the Euro, I carried four currencies in my wallet pretty much every day. I could do exchange rates in my sleep. How have I screwed this up so badly? I wanted to crawl into a small hole and never emerge.

She asked where we were staying, to which I replied honestly; it didn't seem a moment for subterfuge. She paused to consider us. With a roll of her eyes she appeared to come to the conclusion that someone ought to be educating us and today is was going to have to be her. She proceeded to give us a rather stern and incredibly sarcastic introduction to the Jamaican currency, which started something like this, "See this, this $100JA bill, this is like 1, that is 1 of your dollars. See this $500JA bill, this is like 5..." She worked her way through a stack of bills and then asked us what we were going to do now.

Well, I didn't see that many options. If we both walked out, we would have no food and I would never darken the door of the place again. So I guess the only answer is I will wait here and Sunshine will walk back to the room and get more money. Sunshine was none too impressed to be heading back to the room on his own, but he sure wasn't going to send me on my own. So I stood at the bar and tried to become invisible. After a few minutes I decided I might as well drink my Red Stripe. I did have enough money to pay for it at least. It seemed like forever, but Sunshine was back in 10 and our food was ready not long after that.

We took our boxes and booked it back to the hotel. We head out onto the patio and dive right in. With my very first bite of Jamaican food, I was in love. The curried shrimp was delicious. The shrimp tasted great and were not overcooked (which is a total pet peeve of mine) and the veggies were awesome. The best surprise though was the rice and peas. Who know something so simple could be so delicious. Sunshine shared some of his chicken and I must say it put the Colonel's to shame.

I suspect we went back to the beach that night; we stood with our feet in the surf in the moonlight almost every night we were there. After the journey of the day, I can't really recall. I do remember not knowing what animal was making that sound and not being able to believe how loud it was (frogs, of course). When they first started up I thought it was an alarm going off somewhere.

I do know that I was relieved to be there, excited for what the next day would bring and ready for a good night's sleep.

Love Love Love your report this is so awesome I can definitely relate to alot of your ways..."Packing, Compulsive planning, and not so nice when hungry"!! lol
I too will be staying at Rooms for my first solo trip to JA so your report is helping me with my count down....

Oh and by the way great writing as I'm the person that usually skips LONG reports..I'm glued! lol

Loving your report!

I will admit I was starting to loose interest with all the prelude, but glad I hung in until the good stuff started,lol

Thanks Cherry - there's been a real shortage of trip reports to read lately and it helps count down the weeks :) Can't wait to read more...

Thanks for the great feedback everyone. I have been having a lot of fun writing this, so I am glad you are enjoying it. Now where were we...

Chapter 6

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
-Cynthia Heimel, "Lower Manhattan Survival Tactics"

The next morning dawned without us. We were there, but we were sound asleep, asleep in a way that I can only achieve when I am on vacation.

In theory, our rate at Rooms included breakfast. Reviews on Trip Advisor for the food weren't that good and you had to be there before 9:30. That isn't in my time zone. We were there seven nights and the only time I even caught a glimpse of the buffet was on the day we were leaving.

Though we weren't going to partake in breakfast, I was going to see about getting us a different room. I had read on Trip Advisor that the second floor rooms were nicer. I hated the way our patio felt like part of the pathway and we discovered that the shower in our room only half worked.

The Reggae Marathon had been the day before and when we arrived, at least half the hotel seemed to be booked by Jamaicans. I suspected now that it was Sunday better rooms would be opening up. I went over to the office to enquire. Using the shower as my complaint, I asked for a second floor room, ideally facing into the hotel grounds. The women at the front desk seemed not at all surprised at our comment about the shower. I found that a bit annoying. If you know it doesn't work, why not fix it? Now I sound like my father. Whatever, I brushed it off.

We are in Jamaica, so of course this was request was "No problem." An hour later we moved our bags over a building to a second floor room. Even better, we actually have a bit of an ocean view from our Garden view room. It was a big improvement.

So somewhere around 11, we decide it is time for some breakfast. Again, we have no options on site so off we go to the road, this time making a left.

I spot Montana's a little ways down the road. It was on my researched list of good places for breakfast.

The beach road seemed pretty quiet and there was only one other couple at Montana's. We picked a seat and ordered up juice and pineapple pancakes. Don't know what that is going to look like, but how can it be bad?

First bite and I am starting to wonder what magic these Jamaican's put in their food. It just tasted so darn good. My guess, he put pineapple on the griddle and then poured the batter over top. The pineapple had started to caramelize. We drizzled what I assume was cane syrup over it and I was in heaven.

http://i1327.photobucket.com/albums/...1/IMG_0004.jpg

Montana's is right across from Fun Holiday resort. There appeared to be some sort of car rental operation going on out of the Fun holiday parking lot. At least that was the only explanation we came up with as to traffic we were seeing. There was a perpetual flow of cars coming and going, which I enjoyed watching. Though not as lush as some other places, I thought Montana's had a nice shady yard and that it was a good place to pass away an hour.

http://i1327.photobucket.com/albums/...1/IMG_0003.jpg

If you are staying on the beach road and don't know it like the back of your hand, print this map and tuck it someplace where you will always have it; for me that was my camera case. (http://www.negrilinfo.com/negril-map.html) It is not at all to scale, but given how sketchy some of the signs in Negril can be it was really useful to know what else was around our intended destination.

Our afternoon was spent in the clutches of sand gravity. Part of the time watching life on the beach, some time spent reading, some time spend floating about in the sea. The Christmas breezes were up, so we really never had super calm seas while we were there. It was never so much as to interrupt our plans, but it wasn't quite the calm bathtub that I have seen others capture on film. Maybe if I had ever made it to the beach before 11am, I would say differently.

Sometime mid-afternoon, we decided lunch would be a good idea, so we wandered down the beach to Alfred's. Neither of us was overly hungry, so we opted to just share an order of fish and chips. It was good, but I though the batter on the fish was pretty greasy.

http://i1327.photobucket.com/albums/...1/IMG_0029.jpg