Christmas in Antigua

The preparation of the trip was a learning process for me. I hate to check a bag. In fact, I once went to France for a week with only a small backpack because of my dislike of checking bags. Since airlines are now charging for the privilege, this annoyance has only gotten worse. What I never think of are the 37 different types of lotions, shampoos, and various other liquid beauty products that are required by women when they travel – which, unfortunately, require checking a bag. Since we’re going to a beach resort they only clothes I need are one business casual outfit (as required by several of the restaurants at the resort), one bathing suit, a hat, sunglasses and a couple t-shirts. I made the mistake of recommending a similarly light amount of packing to Katie. She started with a good bit of clothing. I finally talked her down to a medium amount of clothing, yet I should have let her bring the whole lot because by day three she was “out of clothes to wear” despite having what I considered a solid 2 weeks’ worth of clothes.

My Lyford upbringing requires me to be a cheapskate so I managed to save $100 by purchasing airline tickets that took us through 5 airports and increased the trip duration to 14 hours … but I saved $100. Actually, the trip was supposed to take us through only 4 airports (Our starting point – Washington National, Charlotte, St. Maarten and finally Antigua), but I didn’t realize the flight from St. Maarten to Antigua made a pit-stop in St. Kitts as well.

We began our trip leaving Washington National the morning of December 20th. As expected the airport was a madhouse. We waited in an extraordinarily long line (which was required because we had to check a bag – just wanted to emphasize that once more) but eventually made our way through the check-in line and security to board our flight. We connected in Charlotte and continued on to St. Maarten where we had about a 3 hour layover.

St. Maarten is not the worst airport I’ve been in (the Russians might have that market cornered), but it’s certainly not going to win any awards. There are two “restaurants” that sell items one would normally see from a street vendor – only the prices are quadrupled. Katie eats about as many meals a day as a hobbit so we forked over some cash for Katie’s “second lunch”.
Finally it was time to board our flight to Antigua. I’ve ridden on a 4-seat Cessna before, but that was the only plane smaller than the one we now boarded. It seated about 15 people in an area that, in any other location, would seat about 8. My legs would not fit between my seat and the one in front of me so I had to sit sideways – as did the 10 year old child next to me. There was no door between the cabin and the cockpit so I was able to get a good look at the instrumentation. There had been some upgrades – the addition of a forward scanning radar and GPS system, for example – but judging from the rest of the equipment I would say our plane has been in service since the mid 1960’s. By this time it was about after dark so there was no reference point on the horizon to fix on to – this made the turbulence that much more exciting.

When I got on the plane is when I found out we’d be stopping to drop off some passengers in St. Kitts. Katie, however, didn’t hear this announcement (or the second, third or fourth announcement, apparently). When we stopped in St. Kitts she walked right past me towards the door. “Where are you going?” I asked. Katie had a look of confusion on her face until I explained the whole “pit stop in St. Kitts” phenomenon.

We finally landed in Antigua around 10pm. As we were taxiing in to the terminal Katie looks out her window and says, “look, there’s a big plane.” I figured she meant a 30-seater rather than a 15-seater. We flew into this airport on a little dinky plane, I figured it was because the airport was only big enough for little dinky planes. Well, I look out her window and there, next to about 4 dinky little planes, is a giant Virgin Air 747. Huh? This runway is big enough for a 747 and we flew in on Midget Air. Well, we did save $100.

Sandals had a free transfer from the airport to the resort. We finally checked in about 11pm. Apparently the resort was only 60% full so we were upgraded to a suite room. Thank you global economic crisis. Basically the “suite room” wasn’t really a suite but an oversized room. The nice thing about the suite rooms was that you had a mini-bar that was free and restocked daily. Most excellent. Wanting to shower after 14 hours of travel, we discovered the room didn’t have any hot water. The problem could be easily solved by readjusting the handle, but I don’t carry a set of hex wrenches with me on vacation so we were at the mercy of the hotel maintenance staff. It took a couple of calls to the front desk, but a man came and promptly fixed the problem.

The resort has something like 8 or 9 restaurants each with different schedules – some have breakfast, some don’t; some are closed on Mondays, other’s aren’t; some require “formal dress” others only require that you are dressed. We learned all this on an orientation our first morning. We might have learned more, but we left halfway through because it started to get boring. The food was pretty good. Our breakfast buffet had French toast, waffles and omelets made to order. The orange juice tasted like pineapple juice, but pineapple juice is good too. Four of the restaurants required reservations. We booked those the first day and were lucky because all four were almost completely booked. You must need to book your dinner reservation before you arrive if the resort is at higher than 60% capacity. The four restaurants requiring reservations were Eleanor’s – with Caribbean food; Kimono’s was a Japanese steakhouse that also has a very good sushi bar attached to it; Mario’s was Italian and OK Corral served Tex-Mex. Aside from the first night when we ate at the only restaurant still open at 11pm – Cricketer’s , the English pub – we cycled through the other’s for our other four nights.

By far the best restaurant was Kimono’s, and not because of the food. Normally at Japanese steakhouses the cook will flip the food around, make little volcano’s out of a stack of onions, etc., etc. Our cook did magic tricks – excuse me, “illusions”. Unfortunately not all of his illusions worked. I guess that happens sometimes when your magic props are small, plastic and come from a box of Cracker Jacks. I thought these high quality illusions would be the highlight of my evening … but I was wrong. I first suspected this when our waitress told us she had for us “a very special surprise”. It was a surprise all right. After dinner our waitress brought in one of the Filipino sushi chefs (our cook was also Filipino – apparently Japanese cooks are in short supply in the Eastern Caribbean). He positioned himself, cleared his throat and proceeded to sing to us Kenny Roger’s entire “Lady”. I thought that was the pinnacle of my evening – until his encore of Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello”. I almost gave him a standing ovation – not only for the singing, but for his selection of songs – neither of which I had heard in more than two decades.

There are various excursions you can pay for, but many of the activities at Sandals are free – including SCUBA diving and snorkeling. Unfortunately the wind was too high while we were there to take advantage of either. We were able, however, to paddle around on a sea kayak for an afternoon. Most of the week was spend lounging on the beach, lounging by the pool and sitting in the hot tub. I love hot tubs. We usually had one of the three hot tubs on the resort to ourselves – another benefit of the economic crisis. Interestingly, however, towels were hard to come by. I guess the trick is to wake up early, snag a towel, use it to reserve a chair on the beach and then go back to bed. People seemed to be pretty good at not taking chairs with towels already on them.

By the final day, Christmas Eve, Katie was tired of “being sticky” from all the sunscreen. She made it clear to me several times throughout the day. However, the day was salvaged with a Steel Drum band playing a concert of Christmas tunes that evening.

We woke up Christmas day to begin our 14 hour (and thankfully uneventful) trek back to DC.