Wolfe Goes to the Carribean!

Wolfe spent his second Christmas in the Carribean visiting the French possessions of Martinique and Guadeloupe. We spent a little over two weeks, about a week on each island. Martinique and Guadeloupe are less touristy than many of the other islands in the Carribean and they definitely had a different vibe there. You get the feeling of an island living....our first place on Martinque didn't have screens and we arrived to find a giant spider on the ceiling. The hosts seemed undisturbed by it, but I was a little uneasy, especially with Darwin and asked Kurt to get him out, unfortunately the spider perished in the ordeal.

The mosquitoes were pretty bad at our place in Martinique, but the house was well equipped with a bunch of mosquito candles and these tennis rackets that are bug zappers and fry the mosquitoes when they touch the racquet part. We also had lots of little tiny frogs that would come sit on the window by the kitchen sink and hang out in the patio. Of course we had to Darwinize the house the best we could which meant moving glass, silverware, and other dishes out of the bottom cupboards, putting up all the breakables, putting the remotes away and of course watching him really closely near the pool. We had a little octagonal pool by the side of the house. Darwin really loved the house, especially the patio where we hung out most evenings. He would run around and climb up on the couch and chairs. There was a little walk way around the entire house and once he figured it out he would run off around the walk way with one of us following.

The trip out there was pretty rough, I think four legs of flying and close to 24 hours. After hurricane Irma airlines reduced flights and changed schedules so what started out as a half way decent flights out and back ended up being long and painful. By the time we arrived in Martinique it was late at night so we crashed. They had a crib and highchair for Dar so that helped a ton. The next day was grocery shopping and we went to one the main beaches near us, Grande Anse, which was really nice. Dar loved the beach he would laugh and run into the water and then run back out and pick up hand fulls of sand and throw them. We spent the week checking out beaches and exploring the island.

The pace was pretty slow, it would take hours to get out of the house in the morning with breakfast and making bottles, and packing everything for the day and then we would finally be ready to go and Dar would be ready for a nap! There wasn't much in the way of facilities at the beaches or any kind of fast food so we had to make sure we had water and milk and snacks and stuff. The islands had a different feel that is difficult to sum up succinctly. It was a weird mix of some nicer places mixed in among average and pretty run down places. It had the European feeling of everything being much smaller, roads (and cars) were small and many would have been one lane roads by American standards, but cars would manage in both directions with lots of curves and places where you sure didn't want to go off the road. Lots of small apartments, grocery stores were tiny and challenging to get down the aisles with all the other people and a one year old who wanted to run around and explore the store. Parking at the beaches was usually a free for all without any real parking lot and cars squeezing anywhere they could on the sand. In some ways it had the feeling of a place where things should be cheap, you should be able to get a beer for a buck or two at the beach, but things were expensive especially groceries and selection was not great, very little fresh meat and vegetables so Dar ate lots of hotdogs and yogurt! We ate sphegetti and bad hamburgers, lots of bread and cheese, some kind of ham/prosciutto meat, breakfast was good- we would make eggs and bread and iced nescafe coffee. That was really a plus, our place had a little nescafe pod coffee maker and we would make iced expressos with milk in the morning! Since Darwin would usually get one or both of us up pretty early the coffee was a must.

We checked out Basse Terre which was a big deserted beach at the south end of the island that was really nice, Petit Anse des Salines, Anse Meunir, and some other beach on the east and north part of the island. We did a couple hikes, ones to the top of a dormant volcano near where we stayed and one to a lighthouse on a peninsula on the east side of the island- Presqulle de la Caravelle. Darwin really enjoyed the trip and the beaches and would go out to the car in the morning pulling on the handle of the doors because he wanted to go the beach.

We took a little jumper flight over to Guadeloupe and tried to find our place which ended up being really difficult, the directions were something like next to some little church which we did manage to find, but still had no idea where our place was. After several failed phone calls to the host, we managed to figure out which codes to add to the incomplete number to get through and found our place. It was up this steep driveway and our host demonstrated how to rev up the car at the bottom, open the gate, rip up to the top, take a hard left into the top parking lot turn around and come down to our place. The first time me and Dar walked, after Kurt had done it we got brave enough to go up the hill in the car. Also it didn't help that our car was tiny and had absolutely no acceleration. Of course it was night again by the time we arrived and Dar was toast so we got settled in the new place and crashed. This one was quite big and modern, we had two large bedrooms with bathrooms and a room in the middle where Dar slept. There was a giant patio with table that spanned all the rooms and had views of the ocean. The patio was enclosed with a glass wall about the height of Darwin, but it didn't take him long to explore the whole patio and want to get out and he could open the patio doors himself. He loved opening the little doors on the patio and would spend hours opening the doors going in and out and pushing us in or out and laughing. We had to tie up the doors to make sure he couldn't get out if we weren't right there since there was a big pool off the patio and the steep driveway on the other side.

On Guadeloupe we both came down with really bad cold/sinus infection and for me it really held on. We were going to go diving at the Cousteau Reserve, but I had to wait until our last weekend before I felt good enough to go. We took it pretty easy on Guadeloupe, found some really nice beaches to the north, one that you parked on the side of the road and was beautiful and not at all crowded. We went back to that one a couple times (Plage de Clugny). Another one we hiked down a trail past some cows to and it was another little gem (Anse Tillet). We also went to Plage de Grande-Anse and it was also nice, but busier than the others with a really full parking lot and some little restaurants and shops near the beach so lots of people went there, but the other sparsely populated beaches were even nicer. One day we drove all the way out to the most eastern peninsula on the east part of the island and hiked up a little trail to an overlook and hung out on a cool beach there- Plage Grande Anse Des Salines. We got homemade coconut ice cream from a woman who made it in an old style ice cream maker with a crank. Turns out Dar likes ice cream, although I guess we knew that from his first Christmas in Hawaii. We had some more mixed weather on Guadeloupe, but usually it wouldn't rain for long and we could just kind of keep going, although there was one pretty bad downpour we got caught in in Saint Rose while we were walking around. Luckily we found a little shelter to stand under while Kurt got the car. In general the towns on the islands were not really the type of towns you would bother walking around and hanging out in. Not much in the way of shopping or amenities, for example it was a little difficult to find beach towels to buy and really nothing like fast food or a coffee shop or ice cream shop, short of sitting down for a meal in one of the restaurants which was a couple hour affair we had to make sure we had food with us. Also grocery stores had limited hours by our standards....so had to make sure we had what we needed, not like here where you realize at 7pm you are out of milk and run to the store to get it. We got a lot of beach time in and hanging out in the evenings watching sunsets from our patio. Darwin had lots of fun on the beaches, we got him a sand castle building kit and he loved building and knocking down castles and digging little pools that he would sit and would fill with water when big waves came up the beach.

Well there are too many photos to choose from and weave into the text, even though we didn't take all that many this trip...so below is a slide show of more pics from the trip. Click on the images below to see full screen slide show. Well I guess that's all for now. We got back to a whirlwind...after finally getting over the sinus thing got a bad stomach sickness, of course at the same time I was starting a new job....and Darwin starting a new school....and phew still don't seem to have time to do get anything done anymore....so the blogs been suffering and we're already feeling like we need another vacation!

Well I guess that's all for now. We got back to a whirlwind...after finally getting over the sinus thing got a bad stomach sickness, of course at the same time I was starting a new job....and Darwin starting a new school....and phew still don't seem to have time to do get anything done anymore....so the blogs been suffering and we're already feeling like we need another vacation!