Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

St. Lucia, Day 1

Today was mostly dedicated to travel, starting with a 4:45am alarm setting so we could get to Dulles Airport by 6am for our 8am flight. Of course, the security line took three minutes, so we ended up waiting around for a while for our flight. Of course, Dulles is unpredictable enough that if we had gotten there later, the line could have taken an hour, so better safe than sorry.

For the trip down, we had a long leg (almost four hours) on a 757 down to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and a short leg on a little propeller shuttle for about two hours to get to the northern airport on St. Lucia. The airport is teeny tiny… just one short runway (small planes only) and a small terminal building. On the way home we’ll be leaving from the bigger, southern airport on a real plane (757 again), for a four hour trip up to Miami, then a two-plus hour trip the rest of the way to Dulles.

On a side note, I had my first listen to the new Sarah McLachlan Christmas CD, “Wintersong” on my iPod during the flight – it was very good, and the first new Sarah disc in a few years so it’s great to hear some new songs! She’s been one of my favorite musicians (perhaps even favorite) since before I moved to Virginia… Caleb and his friends Rich and Danielle introduced me to Sarah’s music (and Tori Amos’) up in Port Jefferson, Long Island around 12 years ago.

The little we’ve seen of St. Lucia so far drives home the fact that it’s a developing country. We’ve been to many Caribbean islands, but we realized they were all via various cruises, with organized excursions, so we didn’t need accommodations, taxis, etc. Traffic was actually pretty bad on the seven mile drive to our hotel in Rodney Bay, and we drove past lots of pick up trucks packed full of people in the back, presumably on their way home from work, and many old and run-down looking buildings. Tomorrow we’ll be able to get a better feel for the Rodney Bay area, and will be able to make some observations based on more than a taxi ride! People here so far seem pretty nice. The hotel is clean and has free wireless internet, so nothing to complain about there!

Our hotel has a Caribbean Night Buffet on Thursdays with a band and free Rum Punch, so since we didn’t get here until 5pm or so, it seemed like the thing to do. The food was pretty good – I liked the beef stew and Kat liked the seafood, including Dorado, which we’d never heard of, but the Internet tells me is just another name for Mahi-Mahi or Dolphin-fish. I tried it too, since I don’t normally like fish but I’m always looking for types of fish I might like. It was pretty good… mild flavor, not too fishy, which is important. I think I like the flakier texture of Swordfish or Salmon better though. Most things here are priced in Eastern Caribbean Dollars, which are the equivalent of around 37 cents US. So the $60EC per person dinner was really only $22 U.S. Whew!

Tomorrow we’ll explore the Rodney Bay area, including Reduit Beach. We’ll also make some advance plans for a few other things we need to arrange for other areas of the island, like horseback riding, a rainforest visit, etc.