bahamas May 28th, 2013
views of paradise
I do believe I’ve finally sold Matt on the wonderfulness of a beach vacation. It only took 6 years of dating and a third wedding anniversary, but we’ve gotten there!! We spent our last 4 nights in the Bahamas on the Abaco islands on Guana Cay, staying at Oceanfrontier Hideaway in cottage #3 (serendipitously, one for each year of marriage). By night 1, he says, “I could get used to this.” And that is when victory was mine. Beach vacations for the win!
Getting there was no easy task — 2 flights, a taxi, a ferry, and a golf cart ride… But once we arrived it felt like time was put into slow motion, starting with our taxi driver insisting that we turn off our calendars for the next 4 days. It’s been a long time since that has happened — no where to be, no time schedule, no deadlines to meet.
We awaited our 5:30 ferry from Marsh Harbor to Guana at Curly Tails, on the second story outdoor porch, a palm tree for shade and some conch fritters and Kalik beer to pass the time and watch the lapping waves. Hello clearest, bluest waters I’ve ever seen, and that was without super vivid camera mode.
Maria met us on the dock in Guana with a golf cart. She gave us a quick tour of the island on the way to our accommodations. That consisted of pointing out the location of 2 bars, 1 restaurant, the guy with the necklaces on the side of the road, the grocery, the liquor store, and then the tour was done. What a simple, perfect little piece of earth.
Our cottage was a few turns down some sandy pathways off the main road. Go past the giant Poisonwood tree with the “do not touch” sign, and the old bulldozer that was brightly painted and covered in surf stickers, pulled off the road behind some palm trees and obviously unused for years, past the sign for Nippers bar, which we could already hear the music from, past the Old Guana Cay cemetery, and there we were.
The place was perfect – dense, jungly foliage and palms and lush flowers everywhere, and wooden boardwalks. Our cute little cottage had 3 bedrooms (one a loft) with wood paneling and tropical colors throughout, and four big adirondack chairs under a trellis porch, just waiting to be napped in. And the beach, which seemed to be ours alone for most of the trip, save for the giant pig roast party on Sunday, just one set of steep beach stairs away.
beach beach BEACH!!
bluest blue waters
3 year anniversary!
postcard from the island
sunset
exploring the beach at sunset. this rock was brutally sharp. it’s not easy being a model
Delta 4 rocket launch, as seen from the beach
moonrise over the beach
On our first night there, we drank a bottle of appropriately named Barefoot wine on the beach. The sun had gone down, and the moon had come up (name that song), when all of a sudden a giant red, then white streak went across the sky. If you’re a Wasilewski, and you’re half of bottle of wine deep, the first thing you yell out, naturally, is “UFO!!!” It was right overhead of us by then, we started saying our goodbyes to each other, when it suddenly gave off some sort of burst with a white trail of gas coming off, I swear it was straight out of the Apollo 13 movie. Or actually, it was real life space stuff happening right in front of us. We later consulted the Twitterverse, when my searching for Bahamas UFO yielded nothing, I searched some more and it turns out what we saw was the Delta 4 rocket (military communications) being launched from Cape Canaveral. sooooo cooooool. Wish I got more than blurry iPhone pics. Maybe that was the fault of the wine though.
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this is the stuff. i kind of ate it with a spoon for breakfast everyday
sea. conch. feet. interestingly enough, you should not try to hold up a conch shell to your ear to try and hear the ocean. the sound is there, but then gross, hot conch juice comes pouring out on your clothes and smells so bad that it makes you gag. watch out for that.
sittin on the dock of the bay
i so wanted to do an Ariel on this rock (fans of Disney’s The Little Mermaid would understand, skip ahead to 1:40)
palmy reflections. i had to move Matt’s face around a bunch to get this shot perfect like it is. all in a day’s work
docks
On our first full day, we went on a snorkel boat trip aboard the Isabella with our capitan Troy, Colin, a guy doing a scuba dive whose name I did not catch, and Dave and Kate from Florida. We snorkeled in 2 awesome spots for a few hours, and saw some grouper, a ginormous sting ray, HUGE sea turtles, lots of little crazy neon fish that I couldn’t begin to identify, hard and soft corals… but the highlight by far, and I mean BY FAR, was the Baracuda. Troy pointed him out for us, and we’re all watching this crazy big baracuda slowly swim by, he’s kinda looking at me and Matt, but not really all that interested. And then he SUDDENLY turned sharply towards Matt. It was so great. Then all I know is there was a lot of bubbles and back-paddling, and Matt was already far, far away in another universe. Wish I had sprung for the underwater camera, that would have been in the top 3 family videos ever. The rest of the time I spent looking for lost treasure chests, but unfortunately did not see any.
colorful trellis
matt’s hand is ginormous. but we knew this
CHEESE
i kind of want to meet this person who lives here
weeeeeeeeeeee
beach.beer
palm tree. you can never have enough photos of palm trees
The rest of our days were spent lounging on the beach, exploring the coral and rock formations, walking along the sand, napping (Matt to me: “I never knew you took your napping so seriously” the things you learn after 3 years), reading (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society-weird title but best book I’ve read in a long time), laying in hammocks, drinking the red frozen drinks, eating ALL the conch fritters and fresh fish, exploring on bikes, taking millions of photos (film to be developed), picking out future beach houses we are going to buy (me), petting our friend Eddie cat, and just generally relaxing as much as humanly possible.
i could become a full time hammocker, I believe
red drinks at Grabber’s. we were warned about these, multiple times.
One of us is a hopeless romantic, and one is just practical. You decide:
me – “Hey we should write a message in our wine bottle and throw it out to sea.”
matt – “but it’ll just wash back up”
me – ohhh come onnnn
matt – “what would we even write in there?”
……..
sippin + biking
hiiiii Eddie cat
pretty red Bahamian flowers
Though the Bahamian bugs may have gotten the best of us, and our backs are quite sunburned, and we had too much rum, WE WILL BE BACK SOON BAHAMAS!!
