Day 3: Monday September 15th

How is it Monday already? Wanting to get the right balance of lounging and site seeing we decided to rent a car today and drive around the island. One of the nicest things about traveling in Barbados is that most of the things you would want to do offer a pick up and drop off service, or in the car rental scenario a drop off and pick up service, which is what we took advantage of. We set the course up to the East Coast views of Bathsheba as best we could with the detail-less maps and headed out.

Driving on the wrong, I mean right side of the car and the wrong, I mean left side of the road wasn't very difficult (not to say I didn't run over the curb two or three times) since the car was quite little and the drivers are all very courteous. The difficulty is really in the lack of, "non-existence" as put by one of our cabbies, of signage. We can drive around a roundabout with the best of them, or at least the mediocre of them; we've driven around them before, even on the opposite side of the car and road, but when there's no sign telling you what is in which direction, it makes things a tad more challenging.

After a few detours we made it to Harrison's Caves, a spot recommended to us by a number of people where you can go down in to large (clarified as to avoid any uncomfortable claustrophobic situations) caves with apparently beautiful stalagmites and stalactites, but which turned out to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. So we headed out on the roads once more. Now on to the "town" of Bathsheba. As with many of the spots in Barbados, we expected from the "not to be missed" Bathsheba a lovely town with shops and restaurants and an area you'd want to park and walk around in; as with many of the spots in Barbados, this is not quite what we found. Beautiful, beautiful views with really interesting natural landscape (terrible currents in the water, every book and person tells you not to go in unless you're a good surfer) for about a quarter of a mile, and then you're back out of "town" (I may be generous with the quarter mile, my distance judging senses aren't the best, much like my age judging senses).

According to the tan and red-eyed epitome of a 'beach bum' man who spent most of his time while we were around town in his front porch hammock at his little house/shop (red house pictured here), most of the businesses were closed that day, though aside from a small bar or two, more like that of Cool's Castaways from day 1, we didn't see much to be open. There were some people with tables set up with souvenirs to purchase and tourists looking at sarongs and shot glasses with either a frog or a woman hanging off the side that says "Just hanging out in Barbados."

We wondered around, enjoying the beach beauty, perfect weather and being out of the car for a bit. Then we headed back on the road to find the Andromeda Botanic Gardens... driving down in to and back out of Bathsheba each direction a few times before finding it thanks to an old Bajan (slang term meaning the same as Barbadian) man enjoying a Banks at another small shack style bar.

The first photo of this entry was taken at The Andromeda Botanic Garden, a beautiful sanctuary for both native vegetation and that which was brought to Barbados from around the world. It was hot, very hot, and you may be thinking, 'why does Andy have an umbrella in that photo?,' a very logical question, I'd agree. As we entered the path we could hear the thunder from somewhere else on the island, and having experienced the sudden showers already, decided to borrow an umbrella from the shop. In the end we didn't need it, that time.

The first image here from the gardens is a tree called the Bearded Fig which is where Barbados gets it's name "Bearded One." When people first came by the Island, these trees were everywhere. Now you don't see them much, in fact these here in the sanctuary were the only ones we saw at all. Here are a few additional photos we took that I particularly liked.

After walking the two paths of the gardens and sweating through our shirts we stopped in the cafe, a porch off the gift shop, for a couple of ice creams and a slushy bottle of sprite to bring the internal temperature down. Then we headed on the road back to the east coast toward the capital of Bridgetown. After a fairly painless drive there... side educational note: Barbados is 27 miles long by 14 miles wide. While there are no straight shot roads across the island, it doesn't take too long to get from one side to the other... we made it in to Bridgetown where we got terribly lost and likely only managed to escape because of that aforementioned Barbadian courteousness.

We drove up the west coast this time, toward what is known as the posh area near Sandy Lane, where according to the drunk blond cookie cutter travel agent from Texas on our flight to Barbados, "Tiger Woods was married, and I agree with them, put him on the cover of everything." I can't explain what that means, after she started telling us about her church going history thinking we were missionaries because we were staying in the Christ Church province I didn't feel the need to find ways to engage her.

We wound up pulling in to a shopping center to get off the wet roads and out of the car after the Bridgetown escapade. We did a little souvenir shopping of our own and then enjoyed an amazing falafel sandwich at a small little cafe. Everything was made from scratch including the pita bread and we couldn't stop thanking and complimenting them. You're probably thinking this entry has been long enough, why on earth is still blabbering about some pita, but it was pita worthy of proper blabberage.

After our time out we decided to head back to the hotel in preparation for some getting lost and not wanting it to be in the dark. We did in fact get lost, a number of times, even being three blocks away from the hotel for easily a half hour before finally finding it. It was tucked away in what would be best described as a residential area and we gave it a shot without asking directions for a while and then resigned ourselves to stopping about every block and asking someone the way. I was prepared to pay the next kid on a bike I saw to let us follow him there, but unfortunately for that kid, I didn't see him.

We had been considering keeping the car for another day or two but were certain once we returned that while we had a great day, we didn't want to get in that car again.