Their first day here, Bryant went off to his classes while my parents and I headed into downtown St. Georges. We stopped at the local craft fair, walked around a bit, then hiked up the hill to Fort George. Somehow, I failed to take a single picture while we were up there, but luckily my parents snagged some and were nice enough to share.
Look at that super-yacht! We think it's either owned by Bill Gates or Oprah.
Oh, and it was Independence Day, so there were a bunch of these children's parades going on as we were driving out of town. So cute!
After the fort, we headed to Grand Anse beach for a little walk. This beach is the biggest on the island and is (in my opinion) one of the most stunning.
We headed home, grabbed some lunch, and went to the tide pools in L'Anse Aux Epines. Bryant and I discovered these pools (and by discovered I mean we heard people talking about them and asked where they were) the night before my parents got in. They are beautiful and look like they belong more in Oregon than on a tropical island.
Obviously, this picture was taken the night before my parents got in, but I thought it was cute enough to sneak into this post.
After we picked Bryant up from school, we drove all the way to the north side of the island--directly opposite where we live. It took about an hour and 45 minutes, but the fastest we ever went was 35 mph and we took the coastal road. That gives you a bit of an idea for how big this little island of ours is. My parents had rented a little cottage on Bathway Beach and it was adorable! We loved our stay there!
View from outside my bedroom window.
After setting all our stuff down, we asked Kitty (owner of the cottages) about good places to eat and ended up going to a little place called The Heights. It's not a restaurant, per se, but this guy who has a little outdoor eating pavilion and a small menu of really delicious food. He cooks everything himself, so since we showed up without calling him first, we ended up spending about an hour and a half playing cards while he cooked. The view was good enough that we snapped a few pictures before it got dark.
I don't have any pictures of the food, but it was incredible. Hands down the best thing I have eaten on this island. We ended up going back for dinner the night before my parents left and I had the best lobster I've ever eaten. Ever. If you ever make it to the north side of Grenada, you have to eat there.
The next morning, we headed out to do some exploring. The first place we stopped was a rum distillery called River Antoine Rum Distillery. There was no one there to take us on a tour, so we went by ourselves.
Bryant with a huge pile o' sugar cane.
Sugar cane conveyor belt. This was a third-try picture because my mother kept talking.
More sugar cane! This is at the top of that conveyor belt. We were actually standing on the roof at this point.
See? So much sugar cane up there!
Yep, that's rum. No one is here, the rum is just sitting in these giant, dirty looking depressions in the boiling room, which has wide open doorways and screenless, glassless windows. Seriously, the way they make rum here makes me glad I don't drink.
I told Bryant that if he made a sad face next to the empty barrel, I would caption it, "But why is all the rum gone?!"
On an unrelated note, look at the adorable family of dogs that live at the distillery! Those puppies were so precious! And these were hands-down the nicest dogs we've seen living on this island.
After that, we headed to the Belmont Estates Chocolate Factory. It's one of my new favorite places on this island. We went for a tour of the grounds first and had an awesome tour guide named Kelly.
The cocoa beans are fermented first by being stacked with layers of banana leaves and burlap sacks, then left in this open-air storage area for months. The smell was not that great.
Here's Kelly, showing us the beans. They're white! They have a gelatinous white outer coating at this point and are sour/bitter to the taste.
I know this picture is sideways, but it looks funny turned the other way, too, so you'll just have to deal with it. These are the huge wooden trays they dry the beans on. They roll under a covered area for when it rains and can be pulled out to dry in the sun. While they're drying they get turned by...
People walking on them. I thought it sounded really gross until I found out the outer shells are taken off anyway, so it's ok.
After being dried and turned for a while, they are moved inside this greenhouse-type building, where they are sifted and dried some more. The piles you can see on the ground here are the little broken bits and pieces that are removed.
At this point, they actually taste like chocolate, so he let us break one open and try some. Still very strong and bitter, but definitely chocolate!
After being dried, they are bagged and sold to other countries. When the tour finished, we went to the store and bought some chocolate bars and souvenirs, then headed upstairs to eat lunch. Fun fact: Belmont Estates makes only dark chocolate, no milk. You can buy 60%, 70%, 82%, or 100% dark. It's rich, but very good!
Random arch-shaped bell tree we saw as we were leaving.
After the chocolate factory, we headed into Sauteurs to go to Carib's Leap. Carib's Leap is a monument on a cliff commemorating the original people (Caribs) who jumped to their death from the cliff rather than become subject to the French settlers taking over their island.
Carib's Leap (or Leapers Hill) is located in what is now a cemetery.
Here's the view down from the cliff, a fence prevented me from getting a better shot, but there are lots of rocks and choppy water down there.
Here's the cool little church that was right next to the graveyard.
I tried to slide down the rail.
Bryant succeeded.
After this, we went back to our cottage, changed into our swimsuits, and headed to Levara Beach.
I went out in the water for maybe 5 minutes, but the waves were stronger than I thought and I got knocked down. So I decided I was done and became the picture taker.
Beautiful, right? There were a ton of islands out in the distance, and that peak there is a small island of its own. Someone lived there, too! You can see the house in this picture, and he had a little motorboat to get back to the main island and to fish.
See how the water is brown? Very unusual here in Grenada, and lets you know just how rough the water was. The waves weren't really huge, but they were forceful.
In fact, it was rough enough that my mother was too short to jump the waves and my dad started lifting her over them. Are they cute, or what?
The sun was going down, so we headed back for some dinner at our cottage and card games. The next morning, we suited up, grabbed our snorkel gear, and headed back to Levara Beach. On the way we stopped at a lookout to see the little island we were headed to.
Bryant got sick of me taking pictures and showed me his booty.
Once we got to Levara Beach, we waved to the man on the island (the one with the boat) and he came, picked us up, and drove us to another little island for snorkeling. He dropped us off and we spent the afternoon on our own private, deserted island.
The view from our island looking back at Grenada. The cottage we stayed in is pretty much directly across the water from this beach.
We went exploring on our island and found this cool abandoned house. It was obviously built by some wealthy people, but--like all the houses around here--when they were done with it, they just left it to fall apart. I didn't get any pictures because I left my camera at the beach.
I wanted to climb this palm tree, but felt too unsteady to climb higher than this. Bryant kindly angled the photo so you can't see that I can almost still touch the ground.
My monkey, on the other hand, climbed much further up than I did. Way to go, Bryant!
Here's a shot of us leaving our pretty little island in the fishing boat.
This shot lets you see how rough the ocean was on either side of the island. See those white caps all along the right side? There were huge reefs on both sides of the island that were really dangerous, so we stayed in front of that sandy spot in the middle.
Sunday morning we got up and took the road across the middle of the island to get back down for church. It was about an hour and fifteen minutes that way, still only going about 30. After church, we changed, and stopped in the Grand Etang Rainforest for a picnic and some hiking.
It was cloudy, but it's still a good picture!
We headed down to Grand Etang Lake for our picnic since they have tables that are covered. Bryant and my mother had done the shopping on Saturday for some easy picnic food and decided on tuna fish. The only problem was they didn't take the time to read the whole label.
I give you tuna with vegetables in oil. It was bright red in the can and full of peas and carrots. Still good, but definitely not your normal tuna. After eating our tuna and chips, we hiked part of the trail for Mt. Qua Qua but it was waaaaaaaaaay too muddy and slippery so we turned back. We decided to go hike down to the Seven Sisters Falls instead. Still muddy, but less slippery.
Believe it or not, my legs used to be the same color as theirs.
The next morning, we drove all the way back down to drop them off at the airport. Their stay was much too short, so we're trying to convince them to come back next year, too!
