Cheaper Than a Flight Home

Forgive my recent absence – it was unplanned. I’d intended to blog all through my extravagant St. Lucian vacation, however, on the day that we upgraded from the Bay Gardens Inn to the Rex St. Lucian, I made the discovery that the latter resort had no internet. That, coupled with obscenely high, damn-near random roaming rates from B-Mobile (my Caribbean cell phone provider), left us blissfully cut-off from all forms of outside communication (just about). Though I’d never felt stressed by my e-mails or tied to the phone, I found the whole experience liberating; it felt like an actual, relaxing vacation.

I’m back at school now, and it almost seems like a distant, wonderful dream (that’s actually just my excuse for why I can’t recall the events in the detail I’d initially intended to record everything). I will say this, though – God bless all-inclusive plans everywhere. For students on budgets, it was fantastic – there was nightly entertainment, 3 meals a day, a variety of watersports, and all the drinks I could stomach. I’m not going to say it took some finagling, but there was a certain meticulous attention to detail that helped keep us safe from the incursion of hidden charges. Actually, while we were checking in, some gentleman wasn’t too happy to learn that he’d run up $150 USD in charges on drinks. Apparently, thought he was on the all-inclusive plan, he hadn’t paid attention to the plan’s jurisdiction.

There were actually three resorts in one, all of the them under the Rex umbrella – there was the Pavillion, which was supposed to be more kid friendly; the St. Lucian, with it’s lovely all-inclusive plan; and the Royal, which was by far the nicest and most resembled an upscale resort (although I didn’t doubt for a moment that we’d made the right choice).

As you can see below, it’s really a beautiful hotel – I’ve never stayed quite anywhere like it (except for, perhaps, the Davenport in Spokane, and, of course, everything in Disney World)

The rooms were fantastic and large – and the accompanying view was excellent. In fact, they started us off with a bang – complimentary rum punches!

I can pretty much break this down into three areas: the meals, the entertainment, and the beach – I’ll start off with the meals. As part of our all-inclusive plan, a buffet breakfast was served at the Monarch restaurant (situated in the Rex Pavilion). After a few days of figuring it out, I eventually settled on a ham and cheese omelet, a few sausages, watermelon, honey dew, and perhaps cantaloupe, coffee and orange juice. Breakfast lasted from 7:30 until 10:00, but no one wants leftovers; so we hit the Monarch around 9ish.

We could have taken lunch either in the Monarch or the Mariner, which was situated on the beach in front of St. Lucian. This was great, because we could walk a few feet from out beach chairs to a buffet lunch, which usually consisted of some chicken dish, lots of fruit, and something starchy. One of the negative reviews concerning the Rex resorts was that the food was sub-par, however, I didn’t think so at all; the food was fine, given that it was buffet style and all-inclusive. All things considered, we ate extremely well – eating healthily and not having to snack once.

Dinner was an event – first of all there was a dress code (of which we were informed by our dancing bellhop as he ferried our luggage from the lobby). There were no shorts allowed, and I believe that only collared shirts were allowed for men. Well, you know me: ties every day, full-windsors all the way! (Well, all except for one day or two…) There were various restaurants available – although, the Rex made it interesting. The first night, we partook in a fantastic outdoor barbecue, set around one of the pools and lit by candle-light. That might have been one of my favorite meals, come to think of it.

The Rex St. Lucian has one very upscale restaurant – the Oriental. This was wasn’t entirely on the all-inclusive plan (the resort gave us a credit, good for one person per meal) , but we figured we’d go for it anyway. The food was fantastic.

Other nights, we had dinner at the Monarch restaurant, since it was easy to do an on the all-inclusive plan.

I believe, on that same night, we walked around the whole resort at night. You see, it was Friday night (maybe – can’t really remember), and I wanted to walk around Castries outside of the resort, and see what the clubs looked like. The night life could only have been described as “too local” – which is something you have to see to really understand – so we made our way back inside the safety and security of the Gates of the Rex. It was after the night-life has ended, so there wasn’t much to do but walk around. We passed through to the Royal, with their huge, magnificent pool, and decided to play around with the night settings on the digital cameras. We were sitting at a table, preparing the camera for a picture, and a very tipsy bride came up behind us, very impressively walking straightly on the walkway behind us.

“You really must keep him awake” she called out to us.

“Huh?” Nicole and I looked at each other. I’d thought she’d said “you really must keep him away, or something of that sort. Then it clicked, and I realized she’s thought I was sleeping while I’d been leaning over the camera.

She told us that she’s been married that very day on a pirate ship in the bay. That’s RIGHT! Married on a PIRATE SHIP! She was very clearly sloshed, but man oh man – what a lucky woman! Anyway, here’s that picture:

On to the entertainment! Every night, the Rex had booked a band or some other entertainment, from 9:00pm until 11:00pm in that perfectly Caribbean lobby. The first night there was some easily forgettable band. The next was this one guy and his keyboard – he wasn’t so bad; he mostly sang love songs. T.E.M (Total Earth Movement) was perhaps my favorite band, and Diamond Steel was a fantastically coordinated steel band.

There were perhaps two very interesting things of note, though – one was the Axis band. They weren’t particularly good; mediocre at best, really, but they worked the crowd like nobody’s business. First, I turned my back on Nicole for a just a second (I swear) to get drinks, and next thing I know, she’s being serenaded by their lead singer – the kid couldn’t have been over 21. Funny thing is, I missed it all. Another funny thing, is that he was singing Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” – one of the songs that had been sung the night before by T.E.M (there was a lot of repetition). So they’re moving through songs, and they bring the dancers out – I guess this band had dancers. There was a pair of male dancers who tried their best, and then a group of 5 high-school girls came out and did there thing. Somewhere in there, one of them came over beside my chair and asked if I wanted to go up on stage. I was going to say that I’d much prefer the company of my nice fruity drink, but then I figured, why not? So I got dragged up to dance with a bunch of high school girls, and luckily Nicole, and elderly woman, and another kid who looked like he was something between Hispanic and Iranian were dragged up behind me. There was some limboing, there was some dancing in the middle of a circle, and some conga-ing, and then the two male dances came out and did a little fire breathing routine. After their little show, the real band got back up on the stage, and went on singing.

The Rex resort was, we learned, a favorite of Brits – Nicole and I were probably the only Americans. There for a wedding, a group of fun-loving Brits got down front and danced to some of the bands – doing such hip, happening dance moves as The Moose (don’t ask). That night, though, with the Axis band running the show, we figured that, since we’d already done the limbo in front of the crowd, Nicole and I got up and danced. Maybe it was that we’d been watching the international salsa championships before dinner, but we got up there, and I’ll be damned if we didn’t look like we knew what we were doing! Words of wisdom from my first karate teacher: Fake it ‘til you make it. Here are some pictures from that night:

It was funny – a lot of the bands liked the same songs. Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” was one, as well as Sting’s “Fields of Gold”, “No Woman No Cry”, etc.

Another cool thing about the entertainment is that St. Lucia is home to a Jazz festival, hosted by the Rex and Digicel (the Caribbean cell-phone provider I’m thinking of switching to). Almost all of the bands we’d seen were actually taking part in the festival, which was to later include such musical heavy hitters as Angie Stone, Anita Baker, Wyclef Jean, and Michael Bolton. Unfortunately, we were only able to catch the beginning of the festival; the late registration fees would have been a little unbearable. Nevertheless – Jazz on the Beach was fantastic! A huge stage was set up just down the beach from where we were staying on the last day, and we took some towels and sat in the sand and listened. We didn’t really have to get too close; they were loud enough to cover all of Rodney Bay.

By far, though, most of the time in St. Lucia was spent on the beach.

We pulled up two beach chairs, stuck in two huge umbrellas, and did lots of reading and watching of the waves. I finished Accelerando and began You Shall Know Our Velocity, and Nicole finished Portait of a Lady and The Bride Stripped Bare. That was perhaps the most relaxing part – just sitting there and watching the waves come in and go out, all cares far, far away. We also managed to get in some snorkeling – I’d never snorkeled before! It was so much fun, although I eventually just stopped using the snorkel itself, because diving and coming up proved too salty an experience for my constitution. Coolest thing about that, though, is that I’m pretty sure I saw a foot-and-a-half long lion fish! (At least, that's what I think it was...)

Another fun thing we did, in addition to snorkeling, was riding the paddle boat around Rodney Bay. Actually, it was more trying than anything else – the rudder was entirely too small, and the paddling somewhat uncoupled from actual nautical motion; we went around in circles, narrowly missing the speedboats that were tearing around the bay, pulling behind them riders on tubes of some sort or other. So it was alright, but by far, the most fun we had was just sitting on the beautiful white sand beach, watching the time pass slowly.

There was a day of shopping, in which Nicole picked up tons and tons of souvenirs for loved ones, and I got some flip-flops and a T-shirt. It was there that we determined that the true definition of a frivolous purchase was something that you wouldn’t really use. We had a fantastic time, and half-considered extending the stay. And so the sun sat on our St. Lucian vacation, but you know what? The St. Lucian sunsets pale in comparison to the ones here in Dominica.