This is the first of three reports to get myself caught up. I was planning on doing these sooner, but ran into a problem. I couldn’t log-in to TTOL, and had to contact Admin to reset my password. Thank you Eric for your help! Also the internet has been really slow and/or not working, which has been frustrating <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/duh.gif" alt="" />
7th February - we arrived without a hitch after an 11 hour travel day. Woke up at 4 a.m. and left the house at 5 a.m. greeted by a cold blast of Arctic air; it was -11. We had been wondering if we would even make it out the door; we were under a weather advisory most of Monday that kept on changing every half-hour, however, Mother Nature was kind and held off blowing through until we were up in the air heading for SXM <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/Clapping.gif" alt="" />
Arrival at SXM was uneventful and we breezed through Immigration; had a bit of a wait to get our bags - they were unloading one at a time! Our Hertz guy was waiting to take us to get our car, then we were all set.
Arrived at our destination and changed into shorts and flip-flops before heading out to get some groceries. Once we got those put away it was off for our usual first night ritual of going to Marty’s Dream Bar for a beer, then the SBBG for something to eat <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/dine.gif" alt="" /> The sun was beginning to set so we didn’t have a chance to take in everything; once past the SBBG (which should now be referred to as SBBG/The Refuge) it was like a ghost town, everything on the right was closed and in the case of C Lounge burnt out.
We were surprised Marty’s bar was open as there wasn’t anyone around except the bartender. Marty has been off of the island since last year. He got married to Lori and hasn’t returned to SXM yet. Since we were there we decided to have a beer and chat with the bartender for a while. He opens the bar around 5 p.m. each day because there is usually nobody around during the afternoon, so it’s not worth his while. There weren’t too many lights on in rooms, and not much sign of life, so I don’t think many people are staying there. What a surprise?
After our beer we left, partly due to the fact that we were getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, even though we had sprayed our legs with Off. We checked out The Dunes and it was dead as doornails, then headed to SBBG/The Refuge to eat. We walked into The Refuge and there was hardly anyone there, the same applied to what I will refer to as the “old” part. There was a laser light show going on above the pool area, sort of fancy. After sitting at a table for a while and being ignored, we got up and left - so much for dinner. Heading back the other way we decided to grab some eats at The Driftwood Bar, but they had closed their kitchen, so after debating the yeahs and nays of Mexican versus Italian food we went to Willies’s for Chinese instead. After dinner we returned to our condo and called it a night.
