Barbados: Day 6

3/13/2025

Thursday, March 13, 2025: Today we had Rodney drive us into town; Bridgetown. It was about 15 minutes further than the restaurant he drove us to last night and we went early enough that there wasn't a lot of traffic. He dropped us off in a place call Pelican Mall. Our plan was to see some shops and restaurants and walk our way south of town where we can easily get a taxi to take us back to the villa. We followed the plan but we made it through the entire shopping area much more quickly than we anticipated. Many of the shops weren't open yet and we were both eager to get to a beach. I was so excited to see a marina as Rodney was driving along, explaining where everything was. He thought we were more interested in the shops so that was his focus. Little did he know, we just wanted to see boats and the beach.

We walked through the mall quickly and saw Rodney coming out of a grocery store. His shock at seeing us was so funny because he figured we'd shop for hours. He instructed us further where to go and we parted ways again. Then as we're walking further along, here comes Rodney again, this time in his Taxi. He's pointing in the direction we need to go and then that was the last we saw of him. He went his way and we went ours.

We quickly walked through the entire shopping district and across the street to the marina. We walked to the edge of this enormous walkway, hoping to get a closer look at the four cruise ships that were in the harbor but the walkway didn't go far enough. We walked along the marina and across a very narrow draw bridge. We can't imagine how large boats make it through this bridge but they clearly do because the marina is full.

It wasn't long before we were walking in the most beautiful, powdery white sand. There were hundreds of different colored umbrellas all along the beach. This is where the tourists from the cruise ships come to. There were glass bottom boats for snorkeling, wave runner, fishing boats, and what looked like jungle gyms for adults to jump into the water after swinging from ropes. The beach was very full and we walked from one end to the other. We made our way to a beach bar where I had the best Pina Colada and Larry had a beer. On the other side of the bar, I saw the woman who sat next to us on the plane. How ironic. I guess it's a smaller island that we thought. We were excited to walk to a restaurant called The Boatyard. It sounded like a place we'd enjoy but they don't accept walk-ins. How strange. They said they only offer package pricing. You have to rent a beach chair and umbrella for the day in order to eat there. So we moved on to the restaurant next door. It was much fancier than we were expecting but it was wonderful. We made our way back onto the beach and headed to the public entrance where we knew taxi's would be waiting. We surprised the workers by wanting a ride back to our villa rather than to the port like most other people wanted. A police officer flagged down a young man to drive us. He was nothing like Rodney. My goodness, he was driving in excessive speeds through winding roads that we hadn't even seen yet and we had to guide him to the villa because he was completely unfamiliar with the area we're staying in.

We were happily back at the villa, relaxing on the veranda by late afternoon. Then we walked to Surfer's Bay for dinner. We were very happy to be back there again...it's such a relaxing and casual place to be. Tonight there was no live entertainment and there were very few people. A perfect ending to a busy day.