Trips We Remember: July 2021

Our first vacation together was our honeymoon in December 1985. We stayed at the very first Sandals resort, at Montego Bay, Jamaica.

There was no shortage of food and drink, with several restaurants, a snack shack, and a swim-up bar.

These little one-person sailboats were a lot of fun. When Steve's capsized, an attentive lifeguard swam out and helped him start over.

One day we took a bus tour of the town and nearby countryside. Our tour guide made sure we bought breakfast from local businesses. She directed us to give our banana peels to a farmer who would feed them to his goats. We visited an elementary school, where the children performed a song for us. We gave them our empty soda bottles so they could get the deposit money.

The tour included lunch at an old plantation, where we enjoyed an aerial view in a tethered hot-air balloon.

All too soon, it was time to leave sunny Jamaica and return to sunny California.

Before

After

br />

Puerto Vallarta was (and probably still is) a lovely resort town on Mexico's Pacific coast.

Our hotel was on the beach, and also had a gigantic swimming pool. We arrived late in the afternoon and immediately put on our swimsuits and went down to the pool. It was a lucky choice. The only other guests there at the time were a family of four. Mom was on the pool deck, attending to the infant. Dad was in the pool, playing with the two-year-old boy, who was sitting on the pool's edge. Dad told the boy to stay there, while he dove into the water and began swimming around the pool's circumference. With both parents' backs turned, the little boy decided to follow Dad, plunged into the water, and immediately sank to the bottom. Steve instantly dove after him and pulled him to the surface. The boy was spluttering a bit, but unharmed. At that point, Mom finished changing the baby, turned around, and saw us comforting the boy. Steve handed the child to her and did his best to explain what had happened (He speaks only a little Spanish). All's well that ends well, but I shudder to think what the outcome would have been if we'd decided to just take a nap instead of a swim.

We walked around in town a bit. The streets were paved with the biggest cobblestones I've ever seen, highly rounded with steep grooves between the stones. On our second evening there, I slipped and sprained my ankle. After that, we spent most of our time lounging by the pool.