Without reservation it is our favorite island. There are several nice harbors and this time of year, hurricane season, most are filled with cruising boats. There is scarcely a free moment as days and nights are filled with many activities. It’s a bit like an adult summer camp. For example, most mornings you can keep busy with yoga, aerobics or tai chi. Afternoons are filled with volley ball, card games, chess or dominoes. Evenings usually start with 3 for $10 EC happy hour Carib beer, ½ price pizza, outdoor movies, jam sessions, dancing under the stars, or bingo with cows, sheep, goats, chickens and rabbits as prizes. If that is not enough, it’s a short bus ride to a 2 ½ mile white sand beach that’s perfect for swimming and has lots of shade trees. You can take a local bus to the rainforest and enjoy any number of hiking trails. A two hour sail leads to great snorkeling spots with an underwater sculpture park and a beautiful reef filled with colorful coral and fishes.
Just managing to get the grocery shopping done is an adventure in itself and usually takes up most of a day. A shopping bus (really a minivan, no a/c) stops at the various harbors to collect passengers around 9:30 am. We pile in like sardines for the 10 minute ride that stops first at the bank. Then we split up into those needing marine and hardware stores first, or those who just need groceries. As I almost always need something at the marine store, I’ll tell you about that one… first we stop at a small Ace Hardware, then it’s on to Budget Marine, then the IGA and mall where they have great smoothies for $5 EC ( a highlight of this adventure), another stop at a fruit/vegetable market, and finally CK’s which is a warehouse type store where most folks stock up on beer and soda. Somehow we all manage to cram ourselves and our packages back into the buses and get back around 2 p.m., hot, sweaty and tired, but feeling lucky if we found tomatoes and bananas.
There is an abundant selection of fresh food in Grenada but much of it is not what we would find on the shelves back home. Actually we can find strawberries, blueberries and nectarines some of the time, but the prices are so high we just look longingly and put them back. Instead we eat local fruits and veggies. It seems like every island has some food that is not taxed and therefore inexpensive and that is generally what we eat. In Grenada, it’s mostly the locally grown food, but it’s awesome stuff like real tomatoes, bananas, red leaf lettuce, bok choy, avocados, pumpkins, breadfruit, papaya, mangoes, and lots of tiny little fruits like yellow plums and gineps. They also have real chickens (no hormones), local pork and beef, but we eat mostly vegetarian. You can even get deli meats and cheeses, but as imported food it’s expensive ($15 US per pound). We are generally able to fill our cart with fresh local food and spend less than $100 US per week, and we eat most meals on the boat.
Last week we had guests and enjoyed a great island tour… more on that tomorrow….