There’s something a bit romantic about the notion of spending the winter sailing around the Caribbean, dropping into sailors’ havens that dot the islands. The reality of it can be far less romantic if you aren’t a seasoned boater who loves the confined spaces of a boat for long stretches of time. There are other ways to do it, though.
We recently spent a few weeks in the Caribbean—a few days in Barbados, a fourteen-day Seabourn yacht-harbour cruise, then a few more days back in Barbados. The Seabourn “yacht” allowed us to see yacht harbours that larger ships can’t go to, all while enjoying the lifestyle of a luxury cruise ship.
With only 296 passengers, the Seabourn Ovation anchored off places like Soper’s Hole in the west end of Tortola BVI, Trois Ilets in Martinique and Terre-de-Haut, Iles des Saintes in Guadeloupe, all places larger ships can’t even go near. But we still wanted that private yacht experience.
We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. We’ve done private charters in the past: private boats in Florida, St. Lucia, St. Martin, and the French Riviera. And even a private plane charter from Barbados to St. Lucia last year—an experience to remember. And we did a charter again this year.
While in Barbados, we enlisted the help of the young concierge at Waves Hotel and Spa (a Marriott property) to find the perfect charter. He came through for us with a half-day charter from Unseen Barbados.
The boat was called Princess Hope, a 58-ft Sea Ray yacht for just the two of us. (It can take up to 14 passengers.) The boat did a beach pick-up for us at our hotel—two crew members came ashore with the tender and motored us out. Onboard, the third crew member, a lovely woman with local culinary talents, had laid out a charcuterie board and told us lunch would be ready whenever we wished to eat. The captain took to the bridge, his first mate poured us rum and coke, and we were off to explore the island’s southwest coast.
The boat was truly lovely, and the captain and first-mate, Barbados-born and bred brothers, had the island in their veins. They were personable and polite to the core, knew every nook and cranny of the coast we motored by, and were more than willing to go wherever we wanted. Evidently, most passengers prefer the northern route because it’s calmer. We’d done that before, and since we’re pretty seasoned boaters, we preferred the road less travelled—so to speak!
The route took us south along the Platinum Coast of the island, past Bridgetown, to the Oistins area, the village best known for its Friday night fish fry.
We turned and made our way back toward Payne’s Bay Beach after a terrific authentic Barbadian lunch on board and a few more rum drinks!
The best thing about a private charter is that it is truly personalized. We have control over the itinerary without catering to the whims of other passengers or even the guide. This experience was one for the memory books as we look forward to our next private adventure. Newfoundland, here we come!
There’s an old saying (very old―it dates from the sixteenth century) that we’re sure you’ve heard before: It’s an ill wind that blows no good, or as it was originally written: “An yll wynde, that blowth no man to good…” In some ways, we could say that about the last two years of seriously restricted travel because returning to travel has been a little like conjuring the excitement of doing something for the first time. Now that we’ve returned home from our winter sojourn in the Caribbean, we can tell you that we’ve been making up for lost time. As we told you in our last post, we had a three-part vacation. Let’s talk about the first two parts.
When the dust had settled on our cancelled Caribbean cruise and we put together our vacation, we decided we wanted to return to the islands, with the emphasis on the plural―islands. One would not be enough. Since both Caribbean stops were similar in that they were both low-rise, beachfront, adults-only properties, which included everything, it only seemed natural that we’d make comparisons. And we made lots. Let’s start this trip in Barbados.
We arrived at The House on the west coast of Barbados in mid-afternoon and were greeted by one of their onsite “ambassadors.” [For a few more details, we did introduce The House in our last post.] A thirty-four all-suite property, The House takes its name literally. We were led into the living room that opens to both the entrance and the beachfront to the rear. There is no reception desk, no concierge desk―only a living room furnished with comfortable couches and “ambassadors” who will attend to your wishes (when you can find one).
Our suite was exactly like the one we had when we were last here nine years ago, except we were on the ground floor this time. This location turned out to be excellent in that we could step out onto our lanai, then into the pool and onto the beach beyond. The suite is so pretty but the bathroom―let’s just say it was past its best-before date by some years.
The property is now all-inclusive, an amenity it didn’t offer nine years ago. Is this a good thing? Well, the food is not for foodies, but we enjoyed it. Last time around, we took advantage of the wonderful restaurants dotting the west coast of Barbados. We stayed on the property this time, eating all our meals in the living room/dining room and at Positano, the Italian restaurant attached to the property. This was actually a good thing, though, because the COVID restrictions are (were in February 2022) in full force. There were interesting (if limited) buffets on some evenings, à la carte offerings on others. The lunches were the best of all.
The property is quiet, populated with mostly older guests hailing from Britain. There may have been a few Americans―we didn’t hear any. And there was a smattering of Canadians. There are only thirty-four suites, though, so there weren’t many people at all.
The House cat and a sunset glass of Mount Gay XO
If we are being honest (and making a comparison), the beach and pool deck services were a bit spotty. It depended on which staff member happened to be working that day. Some were wonderful―others not so much.
So, what do you do at a property like this one? It’s quiet, and that’s what we wanted, frankly. But we also walked a few kilometres north and visited the Limegrove Lifestyle Centre― a fancy-sounding name for a small mall with a few upscale retailers such as Cartier and Longchamp. Then there was a short run into Bridgetown.
Sadly, the capital does not appear to have weathered the tourist dearth over the past two years very well. We saw many shuttered shops and very few tourists at all. And everyone on the street was wearing a mask. So, it was a short stop, and we were back in a taxi and back to The House to enjoy the sound of the surf, a bit of relaxation and a really good glass of Mount Gay XO rum on the rocks. The House provided us with a QR code to book a COVID test that we’d need for our onward travel. A charming young doctor arrived at our suite on the last Saturday morning, completed our test and paperwork and then it was off to St. Lucia.
Getting to St. Lucia is a subject for a whole other day. Can you say privately chartered aircraft? Well, yes, we can (but that is for another post!). When we arrived in St. Lucia, we navigated the health requirements, which resulted in donning white bracelets reminiscent of hospital identity bracelets.
The bracelet
They signified to everyone that we were adequately vaccinated and negatively tested, and we had to wear them until we left the country. We hopped in the waiting transportation and headed off to The BodyHoliday for the next week.
We arrived at The BodyHoliday long before standard check-in time, so we had to stow our belongings in well-appointed lockers. Then we headed off to the beach and lunch. When the time came for us to get into our suite, it wasn’t ready. We waited and waited. At first, patiently, then after an hour and a half, not so patiently. Finally, a concierge staff member told us the truth―the reason we couldn’t access our room was that the previous guest (who was supposed to check out at noon) still hadn’t left at four p.m. It’s hard to believe that anyone could be that obnoxious, but there are those around. To make up for our wait, the executive housekeeper asked us if there was anything we wanted. Usually, in those situations, the answer is not really, but we did have something in mind this time. We asked for a bottle of a very high-end St. Lucian rum we’d wanted to sample. A bottle of the not so high-end version arrived that same day, and a bottle of Forgotten Cask arrived the next day. Bliss on a balcony overlooking the beach!
Then, there was a lovely surprise. The first evening we arrived back in our room after dinner, the room was serviced and there was a tea tray with tiny biscuits. That chamomile tea helped us to drift right off. Every evening thereafter, another tea tray magically arrived with a different herbal concoction every evening. such a nice touch!
What about the resort, and how does it compare to The House. First, it’s larger. It’s not a high-rise, but it does have over two hundred rooms and suites, and it sits on a thirty-acre property which is so much larger than The House. Both are adults-only, but the guest demographic at The BodyHoliday skewed much younger. We expected that since this vacation can be a very active one with so many extras included.
One of the extras that we enjoyed daily was the included spa treatments. Each day you’re a guest here, you can have one of an extensive series of spa treatments, from massages to facials. We availed ourselves of the gamut. It’s possible to book these in advance, but we had a few issues with glitches in the online booking system and said to hell with it and left it up to them. When we arrived, we were each provided with a personalized schedule of daily treatments. We just had to get ourselves up the many steps leading up to the Wellness Centre to partake. It is worth noting that this may not be the spot for you if you have mobility issues. The property will provide an alternative lift up the hill, but the property itself isn’t really friendly to those who can’t walk a lot. There are lots of stairs and no elevators.
Unlike The House, one of the highlights was the food. As a rule, we’re not buffet-lovers, but the buffet at the main restaurant was quiet and extremely well-provisioned. As you can imagine, since this is a wellness holiday, there is an emphasis on healthy food. Every dish on offer had a small placard beside it indicating its content. For people who have chosen to restrict their diets in one way or another, it would have been heaven. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free etc.―they were all available. We don’t go for that kind of restriction, so we just enjoyed sampling many new dishes. The stand-out lunch was the Indian buffet.
The property has one onsite special restaurant they call Windows. A couple of times a week, they turn the buffet areas of the main restaurant into a special, reservation-only space that is advertised as something special. When a server asks Patty to reuse her fork―not once, but twice―there is nothing fine dining about it. Reusing cutlery? Not unless we’re at a low-end diner. It didn’t live up to its hype, and we’d definitely give it a miss the next time.
Then there was the spa. The Wellness Centre on the top of the hill above the beach and restaurant area was all we hoped it would be. It was beautiful, quiet, meditative and Zen-like and offered some of the most enjoyable treatments. We also consulted with the onsite Ayurvedic doctor, and that was worth the extra money we spent, if only for its entertainment value.
The view down to the beach from the Wellness Centre and the BodyHoliday property
Then there were other activities on offer. In fact, there were so many that they had to give us a booklet when we checked in. Yoga and Pilates classes. Meditation classes. Scuba diving lessons and dives. Snorkelling. Hobie craft sailing. Paddleboarding. Windsurfing. Tennis lessons. Golf lessons. Aquacise classes (those were very popular in their activities pool which was separate from their pool for leisure swimming and sun-bathing). And the list goes on. It was exhausting just reading it. But the good news was you could select to do as much or as little as you like. We enjoyed exploring the walking trails on the property and relaxing to the sounds of the ocean waves in Cariblue Bay, the little bay that The BodyHoliday has all to itself.
When it was time to leave, the concierge made us an appointment with their onsite nurse, who did our COVID tests and paperwork so we could move on to the third destination on our multi-layered vacation.
So, how did these two Caribbean, adults-only, low-rise, all-inclusive properties compare in the end? Well, there you have the similarities: location in the Caribbean, guests restricted to adults, no high rises and everything included. Everything else was different.
Despite our penchant for smaller resorts (we suppose that by most people’s standards, The BodyHoliday was small, The House minuscule), we preferred The BodyHoliday and would return in a nanosecond. But you do need to book an oceanfront room―not an oceanview. The oceanview rooms are much higher up the hill, away from the sounds of the surf. But, of course, they’re cheaper!
We have a great story to tell about our trip between islands. Stay tuned!
If you have a few minutes and would like to see what these two resorts are all about, here are the two video tours we made for you.
When we returned home from our winter getaway in early March of 2020, we could see the handwriting on the wall. With our medical backgrounds (Art’s forty-five years as a family physician helped), it was clear that the impending pandemic would put a damper on international travel for some time to come. We immediately cancelled our planned and booked Northern European adventure and settled in to ride out the travel restrictions. It never occurred to us at the time that it would be a full two years before we left the country again! But it finally happened.
Passports dusted!
In mid-2021, in a burst of optimism, we booked a two-week Caribbean cruise on Seabourn’s Odyssey, including three days before it in Barbados and three days after the cruise in St. Martin, then a few days in Florida to round it out. We had our flight to Barbados scheduled for early February 2022 booked and paid for. By October, when the final payment for the (expensive) cruise was due, we looked at the international situation and considered our options. Then reality struck―and it had nothing to do with COVID.
Facebook might have its shortcomings, but occasionally, you can stumble on a valuable piece of information. Patty trolls the cruise groups from time to time and happened to join a Seabourn group. One of the members posted about cancelling their cruise because they wouldn’t be permitted off the ship in many ports or only in a Seabourn shore excursion group. Well, that wasn’t going to happen for us. The thought of being stuck on a small ship―or even a larger ship―for two weeks (regardless of the high-quality service) or worse, stuck with disembarking only with other people was a non-starter for us. For us, a Caribbean cruise means taking a luxurious ship as transportation between islands where we like to meander off the ship in our own time and explore―alone. With the spectre of a group thing for weeks on end (never mind that COVID was still raging), we called our travel agent and cancelled. But we asked her not to do anything with the flights as yet. There were many moving pieces, but there was still hope.
First, we extended our three-day stay in Barbados to a week and booked a fully refundable ticket to St. Lucia (refundable because we had an idea for a personal charter―we’ll get to that in a later post). And why St. Lucia, you might ask? As it happens, we had spent our honeymoon thirty-five years ago in St. Lucia and hadn’t been back except for a few day trips off a ship. There is also a resort we wanted to discover, so we booked a week at the BodyHoliday, changed our original flight from St. Martin to Miami to St. Lucia-Miami, and extended our stay in Florida so we could leave our return flight as is. So, how did it go?
Marvellously! Notwithstanding the COVID hoops we had to jump through every time we changed locales, things could not have gone better.
The island of Barbados!
That first moment when we walked off the Air Canada flight in Bridgetown, Barbados, into the sultry heat of the Caribbean sun, we knew we had made the right decision not to put off our travels any longer. We had learned another tidbit of information from a FB site: Enterprising Barbados businesses were offering a “fast-track” service through Grantley-Adams airport. So, we booked the Five Star Fast Track service, paid in advance and were met before even entering the immigration hall by a lovely and personable, bright-pink-and black-clad woman who led us directly to another door where our QR codes indicating we had uploaded all our health documents (vaccination and PCR test results) to the Barbados government app were scanned. We then proceeded to the immigration desk, where there was no line and then through to pick up our bags. Our escort accompanied us the entire way to the waiting sedan we had also booked through fast-track services.
A half-hour ride up the coast to St. James Parish took us to The House, where we planned to stay for a week. It had been nine years since we last stayed at The House for a few days before a cruise.
We chose this property first and foremost because it is adults-only. It also has only thirty-four all-suite accommodation. The icing on the cake was that it is now owned by Marriott, where we enjoy Lifetime Platinum status, and this stay would award us points (although to date, we have not received them. Yet another story.)
The House has an interesting concept. There is no reception lobby, no concierge desk. There is a massive “living room” open to the air at both the front and the back, which also houses the dining area.
The living room at The House
We are greeted by an “ambassador” who plies us with rum punch (or anything else we want) and tells us what we can expect.
We take our key cards to our oceanfront suite on the main floor with its lanai just off the hot tub and find our luggage already there. You might wonder―as did we―whether it was a good idea to be on the main floor so close to “the action.” We had little to fear. Given the age and decorum of the guests (primarily British, thank heavens), there was no “action” to be found, only a Zen-like atmosphere and loads of relaxation.
Unlike on our last visit when we sampled the many options for fine dining on this part of the Barbadian coast, The House had become one of Marriott’s very first all-inclusive resorts. It seems that when they acquired Elegant Hotels a few years back, with its several Barbados properties, they added this amenity. Was it worth it? Well, it’s not a place for foodies, but we found the dining options very enjoyable.
Not much else has changed in the nine years since we first stayed there. The suites are still exactly the same as were the bathrooms, which need a serious upgrade. There is much to love about The House, and we will go back―after they do a renovation! We’ll tell you more when we compare the two resorts we visited on this trip in a near-future post.
The deserted beach ringing the tiny Caribbean island of Barbuda just coming into view as we approach from Antigua via fast ferry.
What is it about beaches? When we want to conjure relaxing thoughts, we often find our minds wandering to the sounds of the waves rolling in and out, the wind, the seagulls. There’s just something about them, and this world is full of extraordinary swaths of sand that beckon travelers. Our recent return from the South Pacific and Australia with the plethora of beaches inspired us to pause and consider beaches we’ve walked – because, make no mistake about it , we prefer to walk a beach rather than lie on one – and beaches we’ll walk in the future.
Our most recent beach experience was Manly Beach in Sydney, Australia, the subject of our most recent video. An urban beach, it really does go for miles and the boardwalk is a magnificent way to see it in its entirety. And Manly did remind us a bit of Waikiki, which for all it has to recommend it, is not one of our very favorites. So, we started to think, what were our favorite beaches?
Barbuda
A few years back we spent some time at the St. James’s Club, a wonderful resort in Antigua. With its crescent-shaped beach within a lagoon, it offered many of the beach-side amenities everyone craves. However, it wasn’t especially long, had little wave action and was bordered by the resort. That trip, however, did take us to a beach that holds some our best beach memories. We decided to take a trip to Barbuda.
We embarked the fast ferry, known to us now as “the vomit comet” (we were thankfully among the few who did not…well, you know) that beached itself along the deserted shores of the tiny island of Barbuda. Although there are a couple of small, low-rise hotels along the beach, for the most part it was completely deserted. We walked for kilometers in the sun listening to the sea roll in and out. It was heaven. Even now, years later, as we think about that day at the beach, we relax and breathe deeply.
Another of our favorites is the beach along the Condado in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Stretching for several kilometers along the high-end neighborhood of the Condado, it is long, wide and sparsely populated – or at least it has been on the several occasions we visited San Juan. Despite the hotels along this beach being a drive from Old San Juan, their proximity to this beach (just walk out the back door) makes them our choice when visiting Puerto Rico.
The beach in Philipsburg, St. Martin
Two other beaches that are among our favorites are on that list for a different reason. Rather than a day-long beach walk, they both offer interesting perspectives.
The beach at the Crane Resort on Barbados is often listed among the best in the world. Well, that is clearly a subjective assessment, but it is beautiful and its location on the wild Atlantic side of the island does make its roaring waves mesmerizing. Add onto this the fact that you reach it via either a steep staircase or the elevator (!) and you can get a sense of the kind of beach it is.
The other interesting one that brings a smile to our faces is the beach in downtown Phillipsburg, St. Martin. The locals have built a magnificent boardwalk that divides the beach from a string of shops and restaurants. Many of the restaurants offer beach chairs and buckets of beer for a lazy day taking in the activities in the harbor. The sand is soft and the sun is hot.
Speaking of sand, our final two memorable beaches are memorable both for their locations and for their sand – we use that word loosely!
Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France
In the south of France, the grains of sand on the beaches cannot really be described as grains at all. They are pebbles. The beachfront in Nice is wonderful for a variety of reasons. It is bordered by a several-kilometers-long walkway where people stroll, cycle and roller-skate, as well as some of the most interesting beach-front restaurants where you can sit on a lounger and sip champagne to while away the day.
Finally, if you ever have a chance to visit Canada’s most easterly province, grab a sweater and take a trip to Topsail Beach just outside the city of St. John’s in Newfoundland & Labrador. Sit for a moment in the bracing breeze and pick up a few beach rocks to skim into the waves. Listen to the seagulls and remember what Dennis Wilson of Beach Boys fame once said: “On the beach, you can live in bliss.”
Have a few minutes, come along to Manly Beach with us.
The Discerning Travelers 
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