Puerto Rico and Southern Caribbean Cruise Jan 2020 - Day 6 - Barbados
Barbados
I slept in until 7:45 (but still got up before everyone else) and went to the gym. I found myself a little corner for a workout. I sent Roger a message when I was done around 8:45 and he said that he was up and hungry so I went back to the room and woke up Emmaline and the three of us went to breakfast in Cabana’s. After breakfast we came back to the room and everyone got ready for the day.
Our excursion wasn’t until a little later so we went up to open house in Edge to try out the Jedi training VR game they were offering during that time. It was cool, but a little bit difficult and we really didn’t have the opportunity to play for long as we needed to get going for our excursion and there was a line forming behind us.
Again, I had posted in our Facebook group to see if anyone wanted to book a private tour and two families would be joining us for this one making the cheapest excursion of the trip. We started the tour by leaving Bridgetown and making about an hour drive to St. Nicolas Abbey, which actually isn’t an abbey or related to a church at all, but is a sugar cane farm and distillery with a manor house (built in 1658) on the property. Our guided tour began in the house where they had some really neat shell arrangements that looked like flowers as well as a chandelier made of shells and a variety of other shell decorations.
We continued on to the gardens and finally to the distillery where production was underway (unlike in Martinique where the sugar cane wasn’t quite ready). So we got to see them loading the cane into the steam mill (the same machine they’ve been using since 1890). After that we were led into the tasting room and finally got to see a film of old black and white footage shot by the current owner’s grandfather when he sailed from England to Barbados in the 1930s.
We left St. Nicholas Abbey and took a short drive to the Barbados Wildlife Reserve home to both indigenous wildlife as well as some brought to Barbados. All of the animals in the reserve were wild and free to come and go but are fed at 2 PM every day so we arrived right at feeding time and there was a lot of activity. They have a large population of Red Footed Tortoises (native) and a seemingly equal number of Green Monkeys. (LOOK UP - were these vervets maybe?) These monkeys are not native and were brought from Africa around 300 years ago. We also saw some Brocket Deer (not native to Barbados, but native to many other Caribbean islands) as well as a Mara, which is a strange rodent that looks like a rabbit and a deer had a baby (not native).
We left the reserve and made a quick stop at Cherry Tree Hill (no longer home to cherry trees) for a beautiful view of the island. We arrived back at the ship around 3:30 and went up to Deck 9 for some snacks since we didn’t eat lunch. After that, Emmaline went to swim while Roger had a rest, did some laundry, and took a shower. I hung out on deck 9 and relaxed and watched Princess and the Frog on the Funnel vision (since I had never seen it).
After the movie was over, I went back to the room and put away laundry and organized things to prepare for our excursion the next day. I worked on my trip report a little and Roger relaxed for awhile. Emmaline came back to the room around 6:30 and showered before we all went up to Edge for another open house. This time we were there for a robot building activity. This turned out to be more of a circuits sort of exercise versus robots, but it was still fun and Emmaline learned something.
When that was done, it was time for dinner so we made our way back to Animator’s Palate for the animation magic show. We all delighted to see our little figures come to life on the screens while we enjoyed our meal.
After dinner Emmaline went to Edge and Roger and I went to Azure to catch the 18+ show of Kyle Knight and Mistie who are magicians. We were early however and they were playing a sort of “Heads Up” game (although they called it “Intuition”). Basically the room was split into two teams and one person would go up and on the screen behind them were the answers and the audience would shout out clues to try to get the person to say the answer. When we came in the category was movies and then switched to Marvel. We marveled at how poorly people were doing. (See what I did there?) Some people did okay, getting 7 or 8 right before time was up. When we got to the Disney category, the other team went first and then it was our team’s turn (I say our team, but we literally just sort of walked in and found some empty seats not really knowing what the heck was going on). Unbeknownst to me, Roger was pointing that I should go up and we know Darrell, the club host from several cruises (meeting him the first time on our Halloween cruise when he gushed over our costumes). So Darrell pointed right at me to go up and try to answer the clues. Yikes!
I will say it was extremely hard to hear what people were saying. A room full of people shouting at the top of their lungs made it so hard to pick any one person out. I probably could have gotten twice as many right answers if I only had to listen to a handful of people. However, I got 8 right which is one of the higher scores of the night so I was pretty proud of myself and in the end our team won. Yay!
Click here for Day 7.
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