Home Again

Well, Husband and I are back from our week in Jamaica - which was FABULOUS. I can't imagine a more perfect week. The only thing that kind of sucked was actually getting to the resort. We were up at 3:20 AM last Saturday, drove to the Detroit airport, which was pretty insane for 4:30 in the morning, had to fly to Memphis, wait for 2 hours, and fly to Montego Bay. We arrived in Montego Bay at 2:00 PM, and it took an hour to get through immigration and customs. Then, we got on a bus for the resort.

This bus drove us straight through the middle of Jamaica - i.e. over the mountains, on a skinny mountain road, where we dodged goats and cows and a pickup truck with 86 people in the open bed of the truck, and chickens, and a funeral possession, and small children, and by the time we arrived at our "rest stop" I thought I was going to toss my cookies. I paid US$2.00 to buy a tiny bottle of ginger ale at the rest stop, and got back in the bus. All I can say is, thank god for the ginger ale, because I think that is all that kept me from throwing up all over everyone else in the bus. I was very very sick when we arrived at the resort, but, they greated me with a cold towel smelling of lemons, and they offered me a glass of champagne but quickly brought me a Coke when I said I was "really unbelievably car sick." So, from that moment on, everything was just magical.

The beach was almost one mile long, and completely secluded. On other trips to Jamaica, we were sometimes bothered by drug dealers on the beach, but, that did not even happen once at this place. (Probably because it is an hour and half drive up and down the mountain-trail-of-goats-and-death to get to??) The ocean was that perfect blue - every day I thought I was looking at a post card. The resort had four large pools, and mostly what we did was this: get up, eat too much, lie on the beach reading a book, swim in the sea, float in the pool, swim up to the pool bar, eat some more, swim in the sea, jump on the ocean trampoline (very very fun), float in the pool, swim up to the pool bar (repeat), eat some more, play cards, knock boots. Oh, except that on three days we went snorkeling in the morning, and sometimes we watched basketball after the knocking of the boots. We never even left the resort, (mainly because that would have involved driving somewhere on that mountain road.)

Saturday morning, we were sitting at a table along the beach, feeding a snowy egret pieces of a pastry (they had this AMAZING PASTRY CAFE at the resort), and we looked at eachother, and we said, "What a great week. Let's go home." We both missed Gabe and the cats and we were ready to come home. And it is nice to be ready to come home, after a week in paradise, I think.

On the way back to the airport, the bus driver humored me and let me sit in the front seat with him. I am pretty sure he thought I was a crazy person, and totally breaking all kinds of rules about where passengers are supposed to sit, but, he said, "alright mi-lady, if you want to sit up here, it's NO PROBLEM. You come to Jamaiaca, you have NO PROBLEMS." It was weird sitting in the front seat, because the steering wheel is on the opposite side of the car from where it is here in the States, so, I was sitting, in what felt like, to me, the driver's seat. So, I turned to the driver and said, "I feel like I should be driving." The look on the man's face was priceless. (His first language was something other than English, and his English was rough. I think he thought I was actually asking if I could DRIVE THE BUS.) He said, "no, mi-lady, I'm afraid I can not be allowing you to drive the bus." I said, "no, I'm just kidding." And he said, 'oh, you are joking with me!" And he drove us to the airport, and by sitting up front I actually avoided getting sick, which was very good. Shockingly, our flight had been changed to a direct flight to Detroit, so, we didn't have to land in Memphis on the way home. We got through customs in what seemed like a flash - for the first time in my life, our luggage was actually THE FIRST LUGGAGE on the carrousel. (It has to be somebody, right? Somebody's luggage has to be first - it's just never been MINE before.) We flew through immigration and customs (although somebody getting off our plane got nosed out by a drug dog, in this particular case, a very un-menacing little guy that looked like a beagle, but, smaller. Is there such a thing as a toy beagle? But, I have to ask myself, why anyone would bring drugs back from a vacation trip to Jamaica. Don't these people KNOW that they have the drug dogs there EVERY TIME? Every time. I've never come back from the Caribbean without being smelled - usually by large, scary German shepherds, but, apparently the tiny beagles can sniff out the weed, too. Sometimes I just marvel at the idiocy of people.)

Well, a mountain of paperwork awaits my perusal, so, I suppose I should get back to the important business of ending marriages and foreclosing on homes...

Law Mommy