Trip Report - October 30 - November 8, 2020 AKA "The Election Trip"

[original spanky]

i used to get a calendar each year. as my daughters got older i was "forced" to take them down

[gregandkelly63]

i used to get a calendar each year. as my daughters got older i was "forced" to take them down

Where did you find them?

[BikerMike]

I have some old calendar's from year ago it the Cave, all my friends love them , 87 daze left on one of my calendars

soon come.

Respect

BikerMike

[Monty&Melo]

You know the song, sing it with me now!!! Rain, Rain go away, come again some other day.....

Been raining a lot here as Eta is on it's way back, so we've been bar crawling for the last couple of days. I guess I should change the name of this report to the "pub crawl trip" instead of "the election trip". Pub crawling is not a bad activity though.

Basically it has been a combination of Tony's on the beach and Red Dragon and Collette's in Red Ground and the bar at Rondel.

View from Tony's Hut



Beer delivery day at the Red Dragon



And the Veggie Truck too



Melo likes the window seat at Red Dragon



Finally, the long awaited pic of Collette's. While at Collette's we were lucky enough to run in to Roy and Lynette who are doing terrific work by distributing bags of non-perishable food to struggling people in Negril and the surrounding areas. It's called Hope for Hunger and they have a Facebook page at Hope for Hunger Negril, JA. It's a pretty cool program that we have been involved with pretty much from the beginning as a donor. If you are interested I encourage you go to check them out. Really good people doing really good work!!!



Collette and her crew can really cook!!! Pic of some Bonita fish that her son Shemar cooked up yesterday, nice and spicy!!!



Finally back at Rondel for Happy hour and 2-4-1 drinks!!!!



And now a little trivia...

Where were these pics taken??

[dockelleyt]

Looks like Seastar we went skinny dipping in that pool at the end of an exhausting pub crawl with Lenbert as far as calendars I had 20 consecutive years of the wonderful Wray and Nephew calendars in my man cave wall until I downsized 3 years ago stored somewhere, I just couldn't throw them out !! Always got them at the airport duty free shop or Byron would get me one at the No Limit bar 12 days to go and I'll be at the Rondel happy Hour with Delroy can't wait to leave the B.S. here in the states

[Rumlover]

Okay, you can go home now, election is over!! Or stay because the drama is probably only beginning!! I guess we won’t be doing a Negril home search in two weeks after all.

[VVHT]

Definitely Seastar Inn.

Thank you for posting!

Enjoy,

VVHT

[Monty&Melo]

We made it home, unfortunately. I mean once the journey starts I want it to end, I just hate the idea that the journey home has to start. We left on Sunday and Saturday night the weather got awful. Rain, Lightning and Thunder like I have never heard in Negril. Tons of rain, and when we got up Sunday morning we heard a heavy roar and walked down to the beach to figure out what was going on. The lifeguard chair that I featured in an earlier part of the trip report was tipped over and was in the process of being covered up with sand. A few guys from Boat Bar and the security and groundkeepers from Rondel and yours truly worked for a while to get it out of the sand and upright and behind the wall at Rondel. Never knew how heavy that thing was. It was all 5 of us could handle. As has been reported elsewhere the famous Alfred's swim platform is no longer. It washed down the beach by Charela and Coco. If you look closely in this picture you can see parts of it washed up on the beach. Scary stuff.



And just in case you wonder why they have rules about how much your building can encroach on the beach, here is why they have those. Blue Skies (which used to be Mariposa) which had a wall that was already too close to the water built stuff out even further than that. I don't get it, but none of my business I guess.



A few thoughts on the trip.

We were there at the end of July as well and I thought it was dead then, but this was as slow as I have ever seen it in Negril. Hopefully things turn around soon because the people are hurting with no income. It sounds like a lot of the hotels are rotating who gets to work and trying to spread what little wealth there is around. I hope the busy season is at least a shell of it's former self. I hate to think what will happen if we don't have something like a 50% or more winter for these folks.

Also very impressed by the whole travel thing. I never felt unsafe or too close to anyone in the airport or on the plane. Everyone I encountered seemed to be following the rules. Luckily we were able to cash in some unused tickets and upgraded to first class so I am sure that helped my perception of how safe traveling was.

I continue to say that you have to almost look for a bad meal in Negril. This was our 36th Jamaican trip and probably 25th to Negril and I think we can count the number of bad meals on one hand. The food is one of the things that keeps drawing us back (that and the people). Notice I didn't say bad service, that happens lots of places, not necessarily bad, but you know, soon come, or sometimes it seems like almost never come. But I stopped letting that bother me a long time ago. I don't go to Negril to get in a hurry, in fact just the opposite, I wake up every morning in the states on a dead run and I have to cover a lot of ground to get all of the stuff that I have to get done completed in one day. Most days I rush around like an idiot and still end up going to bed with things still unchecked on that day's to-do list. I go to Negril to absolutely not do that, so if my dinner takes a little longer, I try to not let it bother me and understand that pretty soon I'll be back at home rushing around again.

We are definitely headed back on February 6th for our "normal" February trip, assuming anything is normal anymore. Trying to work on the wife for a quick little trip between Christmas and New Years, but realize that might be a little bit of a dream at this point. We'll see, one way or another we'll be back as soon as we can make it work.

Thanks for reading everyone. This trip report was actually more fun that I thought it would be and gave me some time to reflect on the trip.

Hope to see you all in Negril soon!!!

M&M

[Accompong]

We made it home, unfortunately. I mean once the journey starts I want it to end, I just hate the idea that the journey home has to start. We left on Sunday and Saturday night the weather got awful. Rain, Lightning and Thunder like I have never heard in Negril. Tons of rain, and when we got up Sunday morning we heard a heavy roar and walked down to the beach to figure out what was going on. The lifeguard chair that I featured in an earlier part of the trip report was tipped over and was in the process of being covered up with sand. A few guys from Boat Bar and the security and groundkeepers from Rondel and yours truly worked for a while to get it out of the sand and upright and behind the wall at Rondel. Never knew how heavy that thing was. It was all 5 of us could handle. As has been reported elsewhere the famous Alfred's swim platform is no longer. It washed down the beach by Charela and Coco. If you look closely in this picture you can see parts of it washed up on the beach. Scary stuff.



And just in case you wonder why they have rules about how much your building can encroach on the beach, here is why they have those. Blue Skies (which used to be Mariposa) which had a wall that was already too close to the water built stuff out even further than that. I don't get it, but none of my business I guess.



A few thoughts on the trip.

We were there at the end of July as well and I thought it was dead then, but this was as slow as I have ever seen it in Negril. Hopefully things turn around soon because the people are hurting with no income. It sounds like a lot of the hotels are rotating who gets to work and trying to spread what little wealth there is around. I hope the busy season is at least a shell of it's former self. I hate to think what will happen if we don't have something like a 50% or more winter for these folks.

Also very impressed by the whole travel thing. I never felt unsafe or too close to anyone in the airport or on the plane. Everyone I encountered seemed to be following the rules. Luckily we were able to cash in some unused tickets and upgraded to first class so I am sure that helped my perception of how safe traveling was.

I continue to say that you have to almost look for a bad meal in Negril. This was our 36th Jamaican trip and probably 25th to Negril and I think we can count the number of bad meals on one hand. The food is one of the things that keeps drawing us back (that and the people). Notice I didn't say bad service, that happens lots of places, not necessarily bad, but you know, soon come, or sometimes it seems like almost never come. But I stopped letting that bother me a long time ago. I don't go to Negril to get in a hurry, in fact just the opposite, I wake up every morning in the states on a dead run and I have to cover a lot of ground to get all of the stuff that I have to get done completed in one day. Most days I rush around like an idiot and still end up going to bed with things still unchecked on that day's to-do list. I go to Negril to absolutely not do that, so if my dinner takes a little longer, I try to not let it bother me and understand that pretty soon I'll be back at home rushing around again.

We are definitely headed back on February 6th for our "normal" February trip, assuming anything is normal anymore. Trying to work on the wife for a quick little trip between Christmas and New Years, but realize that might be a little bit of a dream at this point. We'll see, one way or another we'll be back as soon as we can make it work.

Thanks for reading everyone. This trip report was actually more fun that I thought it would be and gave me some time to reflect on the trip.

Hope to see you all in Negril soon!!!

M&M

Thanks. Fun read. I think my most favorite trips seem to contain a lot of fun things mixed with a little adversity. I can relate to having to slow down a little on my expectations on speed of service as it is so counter of how I live my everyday, regular life here in the US.
Respect.

[kwhizz]

Great trip report .......Be there in three weeks....