Good morning/afternoon/evening. you join us now at the start of the Jamaican Adventures.

Feb 14/04
We were all up at 4am. Well, I was up slightly later than that, but still. It was close enough to 4am. So everyone else got ready with their eyes half shut, coffee cups clutched tightly in their hands, while I, being a morning person, bounced around smiling enthusiastically, getting on everyone's nerves. Once I was ready, I went into my mum's room to see if they were finished and ready to go yet, only to find out that the plane was late by three hours. Oh goody! So we had all gotten up three hours earlier than we actually had to. So we watched Ice Age, which was good fun.

Finally we were ready to leave and off we went. Wheee! At the airport I set off the metal detector for the first time in my life. My belt buckle was to blame and Calgary security people are very anal about EVERYTHING so they made me undo the buckle and risk having my pants (which are too large in the waist) fall down, just so that they could see that i wasn't smuggling anything inside my belt. Then they found something metal in my pancreas and so make me take everything out of it. Turned out I had forgotten to take my snowboard tools out of there from the last time that i went boarding. And of course, allan keys and three inch wrenches are LETHAL so I couldn't take them with me. I could put them into storage for a dollar a day, but I didn't have a credit card so that wasn't going to work either. (By this time all the adults with credit cards had left me to deal with my crisis by myself.) So I tried smuggling the stuff back in. I figured, well, they've already searched me pretty thouroughly that they'll just let me go back in, but nope! They made me put my sweater through the X-ray maching and then they found the allan key and wrench again. But this time someone else was there and she said that allan keys are find to take in, but not the wrench. So that's now lost and probably in a black market somewhere. And honestly, pens are WAAAAAY more dangerous than a THREE INCH WRENCH!! What do they think I'm going to do with it? Try and unscrew the bolts that hold the wheels onto the food carts? Sheesh.

So I finally get through security to come upon everyone bent over, looking for something on the ground. Turns out, one of the screws in Hal's glasses popped out and was lost on the floor somewhere. Unfortunately the screws are only about 1mm big, so we looked for a loooong while before we found it. Actually, a guy that was walking along started helping us look and it was him that found it.

Alright, so we're finally on the plane after all of the schenanigans. I tried to do some homework on the plane, but was only somewhat successful in that endeavour. The movie playing on the flight was Master and Commander, which I didn't entirely watch, but what I did see was quite good. I'm going to have to rent it sometime so that I'll actually know what on earth is going on. It has some really good music for the closing credits which I'm going to have to get. Very good. Lots of violin. :>

Once we arrived in Jamaica I was presented with a bit of a setback. Turns out my earlier self (i.e. age 6 years) could understand Jamaican accents better than I can now, and so had some difficulties making out what people were saying to me. And unfortunately, you can't do the same thing with adults that you do with babies when you can't understand them, just smile and nod... when you do that to adults, they don't just smile back at you and run away, they actually want an answer or a reply or whatever.

On the way to the hotel, I nearly saw my life flash before my eyes several times... Jamaican drivers are CRAZY! But we did actually make it all in one piece so that was fine. Once we got to the hotel, we were dissapointed again (it was quite a rough day...) because the hotel had given our cottage to someone else because the other people had checked in early or something. So that night Hal and I were in one room and mum and Ted were in another on the other side of the property. Well, not the OTHER side of the property, but not entirely nearby at anyrate.

So we made our way out to where all the entertainment was going on and waited until 11:00pm when there was going to be food served because we were STARVING! (Both mum and Ted are really cranky when they're hungry. They were snapping at everyone that moved. It was almost embarassing to watch because they kept getting so pissed off at the hotel staff for screwing up the accomodations.) Also Hal was super sad and wanted to go home because she was in a terrible mood. I was fairly mellow throughout the whole ordeal, but I'd also been on a plane for six hours, so that could also have had something to do with it.

While we were still waiting for it to be 11:00 and for us to be able to have food, a guy came along and borrowed mine and Hal's shoes. It was for whatever the entertainment was doing. I wasn't paying attention so I didn't really know what my shoes were getting into. So Hal and I wandered around barefooted until we noticed that there were several other women who were up on the stage retrieving their shoes. So Hal and I dashed up there and snatched them back before they could cut them into little pieces and make the guy eat them or something.

After food (and SUPER GOOD desserts) we all went back to our rooms. There was a very odd sort of manure smell in the one walkway that we had to go through to get to our room. And then after the manure smell came one of kitty litter. It was interesting... but the pretty little swimming coves (and the fact that it's Jamaica) made up for it.

Back in the room, which was attached to the one next door, you could hear the girl in the other room. I think she was quite drunk because she was very loud and kept yelling things. She did eventually stop though which meant that it was quiet enough to hear all the mutant crickets or birds or geckos or whatever they were in the trees which kept chirping and were really loud! But oh well. I can drown out the sound of Hali snoring, so mutant geckos were no problem...

At last, it was off to bed. The air is so humid that it feels like the sheets are wet.

And that concludes today's Jamaican Adventures. More on the morrow.

But in news closer to home, my car is in the shop being fixed and even though I'm not 21, the shop let me drive around a courtesy car which is good because it means that I don't have to drive mum's HUGE durango while she takes the dinky courtesy car. I'm sure she's even more glad about this than would be normal... the courtesy car is most definitely a granny car. Oh, it's so hideous... But oh well, it has wheels, an engin and it gets me around, even if I should be 80 years older to be driving it....