St Lucia Part I

So we started out the trip by leaving on a red eye to Atlanta at 10:40PM Friday night. Now it wasn't that bad because we had first class tickets for this whole trip. Tony and I have decided that if we ever have to travel for an extended period of time like this again - we will be doing first class....or we just can't afford to go. I can not tell you how much it saved my knees and my back to have that extra bit of comfort and space. So after Atlanta we had another 4 hours to St Lucia. At one point through my travels, I noticed I was flying over some islands in the Caribbean and I wanted to know what I had flown over so i took a picture with my handy dandy IPhone. What I found is I was flying over the Bahamas. The Bahamas truly have some of the most beautiful water in the world - and it amazes me when looking from an aerial view.









When we landed in St Lucia at 2PM (one hour ahead of Eastern Time) we waited for our bags to come out and finally our big one came out. Only it turns out it wasn't OUR bag and we found this out..........oh.........back at the resort. Yeah - opened the bag and Tony asked me if those were our clothes and I thought........oh no way, those are too ugly. But you know, we really thought we were safe traveling with a big silver swiss army suitcase. Didn't think many people had those, much less traveling on our flight. So back at the airport we go through customs and as soon as you go through customs these large black men with luggage carts start belowing out 'SANDALS??" And you're like - yeah, Sandals - that's us. Now remember, our trip was an all inclusive - so we are thinking everything is paid for right? Well it it. As long as it is through the resort! So we give the guy our luggage - everyone is doing the same thing. He rolls through these two swinging doors and goes about 100 feet, stops, removes our luggage, tells us to check in at this makeshift booth and then holds out his hand and says "this is a tipping service".

Tipping service? For what? This dude rolled our bags 100 feet.

So Tony takes out the only cash we have which is $6. Gives him the $1, and the guy glares at him. Of course Tony just smiled at him. And then this happened to be a sore spot on how we got suckered on something in a different country right when we land. So learning lesson for you if you ever have that happen. Just carry your own bags!

We then proceeded to have an hour drive in a eurovan through the tropical island of St Lucia. We passed by their Olympic stadium that they use to play both cricket and soccer. We saw a lot of the countryside which was very much a third world country. And that was a good reminder. It was very tropical. We saw lots of women on the sides of the roads selling their various fruits and vegetables. Besides tourism, banana is their biggest export crop. So we were able to see banana plantations all over the place. We saw some prostitutes, drug dealers and then a slew of various people. Houses were shanties mixed in between nice houses or businesses. It was difficult to tell what a business from a house just by looking at the building structure. Lots of houses were on concrete stilts to help protect from flooding. We saw soccer pitches throughout our little trip as well - but no one was playing on them. They brew their own beer on the island called Piton as well as their own liquors and Cocoa Cola. As custom with many Caribbean islands, I believe St Lucians speak both English and French. Often interchanging languages mid sentence.

After arriving at the hotel we realized our luggage screw up and thank goodness found out the guy whose luggage we had was at the hotel. But we weren't sure how we were going to get it back, cause of some helicopter delivery service the guy had ordered for himself. So we went to the gift shop to get me something to wear temporarily cause after that much travel I was gross and wanted out of my clothes and we weren't even sure if we were getting our clothes back. However, that was an expensive trip to the gift shop to only get three items. Lesson learned...next time, check the name on your luggage tag!

I will continue this post tomorrow..........