I cannot seem to get rid of my JetBlue points, no matter how hard I try to spend them.
I dominated Amazon's life so hard that I amassed a dragon's hoard of points. One issue is that they don't fly out of St. Louis, so we always have to take a positioning flight to use them.
Why not go to Barbados though? It's the 4th of July and what better way to celebrate than getting the hell out of the country?
We had some drink tickets to spend on the Southwest flight to Ft. Lauderdale.
Ft. Lauderdale's airport was like St. Louis' in the sense that there weren't any Priority Pass lounges available, but they would cover your tab at a restaurant. I thought it would be funny to eat at a Caribbean place and then compare.
Naps were napped.
I've been around the block once or twice but I don't recall ever being offered a welcome drink at the airport. A woman was standing at the airport's tarmac entrance with a tray of assorted drinks. There was lemonade, water, and something weird. Went with the weird. It was sort of bitter, like a really strong natural root beer without any sugar.
I had a chat with the very nice immigration lady about what exactly I was sipping on. It was called mauby but everyone here pronounces it "mouby". And she told me it's good for your health. Not too shabby, Barbados. I'm impressed already.
It was getting dark by the time Adrian the cab man dropped us off at the Hilton Barbados Resort. One of the first things out of his mouth was pridefully telling us that Rihanna is from Barbados.
The resort was in a fun little... jutting out of land. A promontory? Anyway the reason it was cool is that that this was around the area where the waters of the Caribbean sea met the Atlantic. So on one side of the hotel the beach and ocean had a completely different characteristic than the other.
The glass behind the concierge desk was full of awesome Bajan("bay-jun", local for Barbadian) colloquialisms. A fun one is "hungry mek cat eat salt" which means like hardship makes people do strange things.
We were in luck because Brown Sugar restaurant was within walking distance of the hotel. It featured Bajan cuisine which was a plus. I wasn't going to have a ton of time in this country so I needed to make every meal count.
We ordered a few appetizers because this menu was hitting a lot of the culinary highlights the guide book told us to keep an eye out for. The one I was most excited about was
Cou Cou & Flying Fish (our National Dish)
A smooth blend of cornmeal and okra served with lightly seasoned and poached flying fish roll-ups in a court-boullion
It was fine, but not amazing. Cou cou is essentially grits.
At one point the place that was mostly empty was suddenly filled with a bunch of college age Americans who looked like they were in town for a wedding. They were really loud and kind of put a damper on things. We ate faster.
Since we weren't blown away by the main course I was pleasantly surprised when the Bajan bread pudding was so good. It was baked with rum plumped raisins and served with a local rum cream sauce. I should have just ordered three of these to start with!
By this point in the night the hotel was a nice place for a serene stroll. It was a nice place.
Back in the room it quickly became tea time. You know what they say, ole stick o' fire don' tek long to ketch back up.
