How I Spent My Summer Vacation, part II

View from our rooftop bar

Grenada Day 2

We awake to rain and a swarm of mosquitoes outside. Oh, dear! We spend the morning and early afternoon at the villa, swimming and reading. Breakfast is fresh fruit & toast, lunch is peanut butter & bacon sandwiches. There’s more rain than sun and in the afternoon we decide to drive out to explore the neighborhoods of L’Anse Aux Epines. Although it’s highly unlikely we would at this point stay anyplace besides one of the Antoines’ properties, it was fun to see in person the various villas from the Spice Isle Villas website.

a neighborhood villa

For dinner we chose Red Crab, for convenience as much as anything. Because it’s in our villa’s neighborhood, we always give it a try on each trip and each time we’ve come away with varying levels of disappointment. Not this time, though. At last it lives up to its reputation for us! I opted for the mahi mahi, prepared with a garlic sauce and served up with provision. DH chose two appetizers—the French onion soup and a dozen snails. All three were really quite good, along with the rum punches. Our meal came to EC $160, which included tax but not a service charge. (NB: Though the restaurants on Grenada might not compare to the ones on Anguilla, the prices don’t compare, either. If this had been Anguilla, the tab would have been at least US $160.)

Went “home” after dinner to see if we could go up to the rooftop deck and play some Bananagrams, but alas, with all the rain the mozzies were unbearable despite the combined efforts of breeze, ceiling fans, and our insect repellant. We retired indoors instead and read.

I woke up that morning with the preposterous fear that I would run out of books so I grabbed one from the villa to read that day instead. It was You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre, a collection of short stories. I’d never heard of him. It was readable enough but nothing to really blow my skirt up, as DH rather irreverently says.

Grenada Day 3

Socked in. By storms, that is. All. Day. Long. It rained so hard all day that we couldn’t even read outside because the wind was driving the rain all over, even in the middle of the rooftop pavilion—our pages just kept getting too wet. And our internet access wasn’t working, either. We ate brunch in the villa and then got a little stir crazy, so we hopped into the car for a drive. We drove all over LAE and then got a hankering to see the SGU campus, so we drove over to True Blue to explore there, too. Then we stopped at the Spiceland Mall to see if we could purchase a couple of umbrellas, but as it was Sunday, everything was closed. Undaunted, we kept driving and thought we’d see if the vendors market was open on Grand Anse. Two stalls were open, so we chatted with the proprietress while we poked around, eventually settling on a sarong, some hot sauce, and some vanilla to take back home with us.

a cow on True Blue peninsula

Back to the villa again where DH wanted to get back to his book, but I was still feeling restless and decided to go for a walk instead. Man, there are some KILLER hills in LAE! I got soaked through, of course, but there was something fun about seeing the neighborhood on foot and making friends with the dogs along the way. They all seem to come on strong with full bravado but then melt into full-body wiggles with their tails going ninety-to-nothing the moment you stop and greet them cheerfully.

a pothound playing in the water

For dinner we called in a take-out order at La Boulangerie for one pizza and one order of Boscaiola pasta, similar to a Bolognese but with mushrooms added. Our least expensive meal yet at EC $50, or around US $20. Between the rain and bugs, we ate indoors and turned the TV on for the first time, vegging out on the daybed and enjoying the good food.

This is only our second vacation where rain has had a tremendous impact on us, so we’re pretty lucky. But it was our first time on Grenada with so much rain and it became clear that Turtleback Villa, while wonderful in so many ways, is not particularly well-suited for long periods indoors—there’s no table inside for eating meals or setting up a board/card game. And because there are no screens on the French doors, we couldn’t throw them wide open because of the awful mosquitos, so whenever we stayed indoors, we inevitably had to run the a/c. We tried playing Bananagrams on the bed, but every time our weight shifted, so did our playing tiles, so we gave up on that, too. (There is a low coffee table by the daybed, but my husband is of an age where he simply cannot lean over that far in comfort for any length of time, so that table wouldn’t work for us, but it might for other folks.)

our spiral stairway leading to the rooftop bar

Today I read the first book in a wonderful new(ish) mystery series – The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall.