Building drop castles on the beach by St Anne
We slept well. I managed to catch the bread van. It came a bit later than we thought it would. I guess his route now comes by the property around 7:35. I bought 7 bauguettes for the group. As the others got up, we pulled the tables and chairs together and had breakfast. Nice.
Today we decided to take a trip out to the beach in St Anne. We packed things for snorkling, etc. The trip out there is not that long; about 45 minutes. The weather was nice and mostly sunny. The beach was quite full of tourists, but we found a spot where we could down our bags -- we had a lot of bags. The kids rushed down to the shore and started building drip castles and just digging. Thierry and I joined together and took some of the kids with us out snorkling in shallow waters. It was nice.
Building drop castles on the beach by St Anne
We ate lunch on the beach, by a little beach van. They had setup tables just by the shore with a good view. We had some difficulties ordering what we wanted, because most items were in limited supply. So we improvised a little bit. Thierry and I reserved the last remaining fish plates (3) before we started asking the kids and others what they wanted.
Fish plate for lunch. Unfortunately we were only able to
order three plates.
We then ended up with a mix of plat-du-jour (colombo meat/rice), salad, fried chicken with french fries, extra plates of fries, beer, etc. Most enjoyable. It was just as chaotic to sort out the bill as it was ordering because they just presented us with a total without decomposition.
Thierry enjoying the sun after lunch
After lunch I had gotten rather cooked from the sun and wanted out. I also had to make a trip up to the car rental place to at least tell them about the accident I had. We broke up into three groups. We sent Susan, Naveed and Barry off to look for sail boats in Gosier. Lillemor and Thierry were going, with dad, Sophy and the kids, to visit the new Carrefour supermarket that had just opened.
I stopped by the car rental place. They just sniggered, especially when I asked for a new accident report form! After that I looked for a local GSM cell phone provider to see if I could not buy a pre-paid card to use my phone here. I found them, ironically next door to the place where I had the car accident. They were not able to install a chip because they needed a special activation code from Voice Stream to reassign the phone (temporarily) to their network. So I have to go through my paperwork back at the bungalow. I then drove over Basse Terre and down to Bouillante to hook up with the diving place I had contacted from the US. Very nice. I met a Jerome and setup an appointment with them for two dives on Friday. That should hopefully give us a bit of time to get the masks from the US. I then drove back to the bungalow. It takes about 30 minutes to go drive from the diving place to the bungalow. Good to know for Friday.
I was the only one there back at the bungalows. The others had not yet returned from their adventures. I sat down and relaxed a little bit. Within about an hour Lilly arrived with Sophy, my dad, Karl and Erik. They had not managed to find Carrefour despite asking for directions along the way. So they had eventually gone to Continent, the other big market we liked from last year. To be on the safe side, Lilly had bought food thinking it was early enough in the week that we would consume it anyway. A little later Thierry arrived with Brigitte, Morgan, Gaetan and Isabella. They had found Carrefour but were not very impressed. It did not stack up with Continent. While we were unloading the cars, the mountain guide I had talked to arrived. Actually, it was not just one single person but a whole bunch of people.
After we had unloaded we met up with the guides who were patiently waiting for us. They had lots of interesting things to offer. They wrote things down on a paper for us to consider and then get back to them asap. After we were done talking about hiking, David, one of the guides, said he had a question to ask us. He said he had seen some commercials where a few guys were screaming WAZUP to each other. He was wondering what it meant. When I told them that this was a beer commercial and that the guys were just "communicating" with each other in a rather primitive way. They were just saying "What's up". We all had a good laugh from that. We must have spent about one hour talking. They felt knowledgable and interesting. During our conversation with them, the kids had a real racket in both bungalows, screaming, and just playing around. One of our neighbors got a bit upset. No wonder!
After the guides left we started to prepare a communal dinner again. We ate and talked for some time. After we had put the kids to bed, we switched over to candles by the tables and started to talk about how we should lay out the remainder of our stay. Thierry remarked how it felt like he had already been here several days. We also got some Pina Colada mix and Rum out on the table and that kept us going for a while. Very nice. Less than sober, we went to bed.