Barbados

I flew to Barbados Thursday afternoon to meet up with my parents. We are staying at the nicest place I have ever stayed in! The restaurants are fabulous and the views are unbelievable. I can't capture it on my camera. You can look at the place more at http://www.thecrane.com/. I really love Barbados! When I came here with Julie & Ralna in May we stayed on the Caribbean side. This time I am staying on the Atlantic side. There is a very big difference. The waves on this side are big (there were hardly any waves on the Caribbean side) and the winds from the ocean make it much cooler. Here are a bunch of pictures and videos of our trip so far. I'm going back to Dominica on Saturday (9 whole days here!). One of the neatest things (I think) is that Barbados has wild monkeys! My dad and I went to play tennis one day and there were 5 or 6 monkeys hanging out around the court! They have little yellow faces. I wanted to go back and try to feed them some bananas, but Ryan told me about some diseases I could catch from them. Oh well. We went out on a catamaran one day and went snorkeling. It was SO much fun! I would definitely recommend it to anybody coming to Barbados (Courtney & Andy) and to anybody who likes to sail (Courtney & Andy). We went with Cool Runnings Sailing. The crew was super nice and waited on everybody hand and foot. They served lunch and it was delicious. We went to two different spots to snorkel. The first stop we snorkeled with sea turtles. We fed them bread and so the turtles and the fish swam right up to my goggles. It was a little too close for my comfort! A fish actually scraped my arm with it's fin. Of the islands I have visited (Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Saba, San Juan, and St. Martin), Barbados is definitely my favorite! I have flown in/out of Antigua several times and hope to visit there someday.

Locals jumping off the cliff on our beach.

Dad and me snorkeling.

I swam all the way from the boat to the shore and back. That was a long way for me!
Shopping for local art.
Mom watching the waves.
One of the many pools.

Dad trying to pose like the statue.
Dad watched the locals jumping from the cliff and decided to try it himself.
There he goes!

View of the beach from the cliff. Ok, there are 5 videos: one taken from the back of the sailboat, one taken of our hotel room the night I arrived (the sound of crickets in the background kind of make it sound like a horror movie), one of some monkeys we saw as we were driving, one of Dad about to jump off the cliff, and one of our view from our room. The last video won't load, so I'll try later.