We spent 8 nights on Grenada and 8 nights on Antigua. The time on Grenada just raced by while the time on Antigua dragged. We hated to leave Grenada and could hardly wait to get away from Antigua. We will give you some of the reasons for the differences in the islands.<br><br>First of all, we would like to mention that the plane from Chicago to San Juan, on the second leg of our trip, on 2/5/02 was only about half full. It certainly does appear that tourism to the Caribbean is sharply down from what we have experienced in past years.<br><br>GRENADA: We stayed at the Coyaba Resort on Grenada. They have 5½ acres of beautifully kept-up grounds. They employ 5 or 6 full time gardeners to maintain all of the tropical bushes and flowers. Coyaba is right on Grand Anse Beach, which seems to have lost some sand from the last time that I was there (about 25 years ago), but it is still a very nice beach. We enjoyed the beach, sand, and swimming every day that we were there. We had frequent clouds and rain in the mornings, but they usually cleared up by about 9:00 AM.<br><br>The room that we had was quite a nice room for the price (we had negotiated a price reduction because of the reduction in tourists). It had a telephone, television, twin beds, full bathroom, etc. The one negative was that the water was heated by solar power and the back-up heater for night-time use seemed to be inoperative and no one seemed to know how to fix it. Consequently, we adjusted our schedules so that we did things that might require hot water in the day time.<br><br>Coyaba is also just across the street from a small shopping mall. We dropped over there several days for snack items and incidentals. Coyaba offers an all-inclusive option, but we took a plan that provided us with no meals other than the ones that we ordered.<br><br>ANTIGUA: Here we stayed at a condominium, time-share type of place called Antigua Village. The place is over 20 years old, and certainly looks it. The view from our rooms was lovely, the grounds were reasonably nice, but the unit that we had needed a major overhaul. It had louvered window shutters which didn’t close all of the way and, even when closed, had many gaps and open cracks. The screens on the interiors of the windows were old and didn’t fit correctly (in some cases they hardly fit at all). Consequently, several mosquitoes came to visit us every night. Bobbie got bitten at least 60 times and looked like she had chicken pox. I only got bitten about 6 times (I guess that she was tastier than I). We complained to the main office and they sent a handyman over to do some work on the screens, but it was far from adequate.<br><br>The travel books and the literature that Antigua Village sent to us indicated that Dickenson Bay is a “wide strip of powder-soft sand and blissfully calm turquoise waters”. In fact, their pictures even show a considerable amount of sand in front of their place. In actuality, this beach lost most of its sand to hurricanes in 1995 and 1999. Only the section in front of Sandals has most of its sand. The rest of the beach consists of a few small pockets of sand on down the beach for about ½ mile. The pocket of sand in front of Antigua Village is about 25 or 30 feet wide. On down the beach, there are several abandoned houses, businesses, restaurants, etc. Apparently, on Antigua, when a building has been damaged from a hurricane and the owners don’t (or can’t) repair it, they just abandon it. The ocean water, itself, was quite nice for swimming.<br><br>Antigua Village also used solar power to heat its water, but the water heater for our unit was apparently broken all of the time that we were there (the handyman didn’t seem to know how to fix it). The best that we could get out of it was slightly tepid water, even in the day time. The unit had a safe, but they wanted $3 per day for a key. We opted to leave our valuables in the safe at the office.<br><br>While on Antigua, we took a day trip over to the Hawksbill Resort. The grounds there are lovely, especially when compared to Antigua Village. The taxi over and back (a distance of about 5 miles) cost us approximately $24 each way. We used the 4th beach with no problems from the security personnel (As mentioned in another posting of ours, we had brought blue towels over from Antigua Village, and that is also the color of the towels at Hawksbill). The swimable portion of the beach is only about 60 feet wide and there is a drop-off of about 2 1/2 or 3 feet at the at the point where the waves break. We were told that the main beach also has that same drop-off. There were about 12 other couples on the 4th beach when we were there, which is more than we saw on all of the other beaches combined. All in all, we did enjoy that portion of our stay on Antigua and might go back to Hawksbill again, but NOT ANTIGUA VILLAGE. <br>