My husband and I have been fortunate enough to travel to exotic islands at such a young age. Our favorite was to Sandals, an all-inclusive resort. I was excited from the time I made the phone call to Sandals to make our reservations. While you are waiting they play tropical music and the lady that speaks has a “Jamaican” accent. It brings happy memories to mind when you hear it.
We boarded a five-hour flight to the island of St. Lucia. When we arrived at the airport, we were greeted with unfriendly faces. The airport was smaller than a grocery store. A man approached us in a uniform, took our suitcases from us, and moved them about fifteen feet to the curb. Then he looked at us and demanded money. I was getting a little frightened. We do not carry much cash especially on travels and we only had a dollar on us. My husband handed him the dollar we had and he gave us a look of disgust. Finally, we see a representative from Sandals and he puts us in a taxi and we are off to the resort.
On the way we saw people walking down the road with buckets on their heads and goats walking around as commonly as you would see people. The roads were barely paved. I thought to myself that we had landed on the wrong island. We drove up a steep hill and entered through the gates that said “Sandals” on them. It was if we had just found the Wizard of Oz. It was beautiful, there was lush landscaping, tropical plants, and bright colored flowers everywhere.The taxi driver opens the door for us and we start to get our luggage out of the back and they pushed us on and would not let us handle our own luggage. Then we were greeted by smiling faces outside of the double doors. The employees used tongs to hand us cold rags for our faces because we had traveled all day. Then they brought us into the checkout room and nearly forced us to sit down and relax while they were checking us in. Then we were handed a glass of wine and told to stay seated and relax, we are at Sandals now and they are going to take care of us.
After checking in we went out in front of the resort and waited for our transportation up to our room. The resort is spread over two hundred acres so they provide transportation around the resort in small buses. Once we got to our room they carried our luggage inside for us. We walked in to a beautiful mahogany four poster bed. The bathroom was a bit small but had all of the necessities that we would need. There was a standard size tub, toilet, and sink. There was not anything “special” about the bathroom. The room had tile throughout and was very clean. There was no dust in the corners or spider webs at the top of the vaulted ceilings. There was mints on our pillow and a note from the maid letting us know to make ourselves at home. The maid was like a “thief in the night”. She was always there but we never saw her. It seemed as though she would see us leave our room and run in and tidy everything up. We would go up to the room and change out of our bathing suits into new clothes and leave sand all over the floor from the beach. The maid had our mess cleaned up before we would return to our room. When we would return to our room at night our covers were turned down for us. Our room was on the top of a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was absolutely beautiful. We could see the Piton Mountains from our room, which is what St. Lucia is known for.
We got to know the drivers by the second day, they were calling us by our names. They would do anything for us and were happy to do it. We ordered drinks to our room, asked for more towels in the middle of the night, anything we asked they were happy to do it. They had two swim up bars and the bartenders got to know us quite well. By the second or third day they would greet us by our names and ask if we were having the “usual”.
This is an all-inclusive resort so we ate all of our meals in their seven restaurants they have. During breakfast and lunch we would usually go to the buffet. The staff would wait for you to finish putting your meal on your plate then they would take your plate from you and carry it over to your table. Then they would pull your chair out and place your napkin in your lap. We thought we died and went to heaven. There was seven themed restaurants on the property. Our favorite was called Kimonos. They serve Japanese food and they cook it in front of you. The chef would put on a “show” while he was cooking the food. It was delicious. They were willing to cook as much or little food that we would like. One thing is for sure we were never hungry while we were there. There is a no-tipping policy at the resort. We thought we would not receive very good service because the servers did not have a reason to “go the extra mile” for us. We were happily surprised that we received impeccable service.
The day that we had to fly home we were so sad to leave our little slice of heaven. It was time to go back to the “real” world and rat race.
