Monday, August 5, 2013

St. Kitts: A Smith Family Vacation {Part 2}

Happy Monday, ya'll! I'm back with the next couple of days from our St. Kitts vacation!

Day 4- Tuesday 

Tuesday started with another trip to the gym. After a good workout and some breakfast, everyone headed back down to the beach for a day of fun in the sun. This time around, we brought our cameras down to capture some of the beauty of the island and take a couple family pictures by the ocean!







We really wanted to get a picture of the entire group, so we set up one of the pool stools, turned my camera to a 10-second timer, put everyone in position, and snapped this picture below! I think it turned out awesome! 




After our mini photo shoot, we spent the rest of the day lounging and throwing the football before heading up to the pool around 4 for pool bingo! 




We played three rounds of bingo and on the last round, Brandon won! His prize was a Marriott Vacation Club drawstring bag and a yellow t-shirt! 

For dinner Tuesday night, we drove down the street to Ciao, an Italian restaurant where, once again, dinner was DELICIOUS! After dinner, we ventured back to the casino for the rest of the night! At the end of the night, Ryan and I both left up $20! 


Getting ready to play some blackjack! 
Day 5- Wednesday 

On Wednesday, we celebrated Rachel's birthday! In the morning, she opened birthday presents from me, Ryan, Brad and Susan! Since Brandon, Rachel, and I all have birthdays really close to each other, we all exchanged birthday presents with each other so that we could celebrate together! After our first birthday celebration, everyone got dressed and we decided to drive the entire island.


St. Kitts is 10ish miles long and there is one road that we took all the way around the island. First, we drove down the peninsula to Cockleshell Beach, where we ate lunch at Reggae Beach Bar and Grill. On the way to the beach, we drove past tons of wild monkeys! *Here's a little trivia for you: There are more monkeys on the island than humans and there are roughly 36,000 people living on St. Kitts! 



Right when we walked into the restaurant (or more appropriately- shack), we stumbled upon a Georgia Tech flag hanging from the ceiling. The waitress brought us a sharpie and Ryan, Brad, and I were able to sign and leave our mark in St. Kitts! The restaurant also had a UGA flag that Brandon and Rachel were able to sign.



Once our bellies were full, we left the shack, walking by a cage holding two monkeys. They were loving the attention but I couldn't get over how sad they looked to be locked up on the beach. Let those monkeys back into the wild!! 

LET ME OUT!!  
Our trek around the island took about 4 hour, including a couple stops. We stopped first at the top of another small mountain overlooking the area we had just come from and took a couple pictures!




The Smith Men! 


We continued our drive around the island, detouring again to see Brimstone Hill Fortress (which we drove up to and quickly turned around after realizing it cost money to tour!) and Ottley's Plantation on the east side of the island. 

Ottley's was seated on top of a mountain, and it was an adventure in itself trying to reach it in our rental van. On our drive up to the plantation, we came across an extremely steep section of the road. In order to lighten our load, Brandon, Ryan, and Rachel hopped out of the van and walked up the hill. Brad decided to gun it to get enough power to get all the way up, but didn't realize quite how steep it was and almost bottomed out the car! It was quite the adventure and definitely made for some entertainment! Luckily, we made it to the top because the plantation was beautiful and actually had trails that put you right through the heart of the rainforest! 

The Beautiful plantation
Down in the rainforest
After our little trek through the rainforest, we hopped back into the car and finished our drive around the island. We got back to the Marriott around 6 and quickly got ready for Rachel's birthday dinner at Bombay Blues, an Indian restaurant down the street! This was most of our first time trying Indian and we got an order of the butter chicken and the chicken tikka masala (both were SO good!).

At Bombay Blues! 
After dinner, we came back to the room, ate some DELICIOUS birthday cake, and spent the rest of the night playing Telestrations! 



Can anyone guess what Ryan was trying to draw in the picture below?!


And with that, our vacation was more than half way over!

-Sarah

3 comments :

  1. Holy Cow!!! says Tim Schoeff

    Great pics

    ReplyDelete
  2. i found you! :)

    looks like you had a great time.
    see ya laters.

    ReplyDelete