Yesterday we picked Sherri up from the Airport, and drove back to the yacht club with a stop at the store, to pick up ‘one or two things’. This turned into a buying spree costing about 10,000 Jamaican dollars which sounds a lot but is only about $80 in US money. The Jamaican dollar started out worth more than the US dollar, but due to high inflation in the 80s and 90s it is now worth less than cent. Still…
In the tourist areas of Jamaica you either pay to get into a private facility with heavy security, or accept that people will be trying to aggressively sell you stuff or steal your stuff. Somewhere out there, I hope, is a real Jamaica full of nice people who aren’t trying to rip you off. We haven’t found it yet though. Exploring is stressful so we decided to return to the most beautiful and magical place on the Island, Rocklands Bird…
Last night we went to a floating restaurant called The Houseboat for dinner. It’s moored a little off shore in a marine sanctuary. Rather than extend to dock to the boat or use a long gangplank, you get out there by raft. You sit on the benches and the attendant casts off, gives the raft a good hard shove, and jumps aboard. The raft glides across to a soft landing on the houseboat. We sat on the roof so we…
First stop today was Doctor’s Cave Beach and the commercial strip that lies next to it. We found a paid parking spot close to the beach entrance, and before we had paid to park someone offered to sell me ganja. The beach costs $6 (US) a person to enter but for that you get a lifeguard, luxurious modern restrooms, showers, and changing rooms, as well as heavy policing. Yes, it’s a gated community among beaches. That’s the view from the…
Yesterday we flew into Montego Bay to join the sailboat Mantra owned by our friends Peter and Sherri. Sherri is in the US right now but will be back in Jamaica in few days, and we will help sail the boat to Colombia. In the mean time we get to be tourists. This morning we took our rented car up a steep, winding, narrow, busy mountain road to a steep, winding, narrow, badly-surfaced, single track but thankfully not quite as…
There is so much Rococo revival glop in the Flagler mansion in Palm Beach it makes you want to poke your eyes out, or at least go to Ikea and stare at cardboard boxes till your vision recovers. That was the drawing room, with the art case Steinway grand piano. The music room has it’s own organ. Flagler was a partner in Standard Oil, and then went on to build a railway down the East Coast of Florida and invent…
They look tanned and healthy enough, but I’m pretty sure that most of the population of West Palm Beach is undead. They are too tanned to be vampires so my money is on zombies. How else do you explain the huge flock of vultures circling over the town center… … and roosting on window ledges. You can see it in their eyes, that blank, fashion conscious, Fox News watching, undead stare. Who else but zombies would be tearing down an…
St Augustine is the oldest European town in the USA, founded in 1565, 20 years before the Roanoke colony and 55 years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed. However, it has been blanked out of American history books, because the people who founded it spoke Spanish and not English. The Spanish got corn tortillas and beans from the Native Americans, while the Pilgrims got turkey and sweet potatoes. If we really understood American history we would all be eating tacos for…
This, my friends, is the business end of a Saturn V, the rocket that took men to the moon. After all these years, and in spite of the best efforts of the Russians, the Chinese, and Elon Musk, the Saturn V is still the most powerful rocket ever built. It could deliver 140 metric tons to low earth orbit. That’s more than twice the Falcon Heavy’s payload, six times the Space Shuttle’s, bigger than anything the Russians ever had, and…
The passage from Florida to Grand Bahama and back is one of the shortest and cheapest cruise ship journeys anywhere. In fact when times are bad, millions of spam messages appear giving them away “free” (except for taxes, port fees, drinks, portholes, and anything you do on Grand Bahama that actually involves having fun). The cruise ship terminal is in an industrial port, with a big container transshipment facility, dry dock, oil storage, and limestone quarry. One of Grand Bahama’s…