Anguilla. Part 2. Mom, I have a headache.
We woke up (too early) for our first full day. I think I was up at 650.
By 855am we were on bikes heading to breakfast. There are bikes placed all over the resort that you can just grab one and ride around. It’s not like Rosewood Mayakoba where every room got a dedicated bike. It’s more of a free for all here.
Breakfast is in the combined space of Cips and Pimm’s. Both are beautiful open spaces (of course no walls) with sweeping views of the whole bay. We were seated at a table in the Cips side next to the water. They serve a buffet and an à la carte menu. The buffet had some great pastries, as well as eggs, fruits, yogurts. The pastries were really good and very fresh. We also tried the oat crusted French toast, which we didn’t realize was gluten free. It tasted gluten free.
After breakfast Tzvi went to the beach and I went to the gym before joining him. We spent most of the day just sitting on the beach and relaxing. We swam in the ocean a bit. I think this is definitely one of the top two waters I’ve ever been in. Anguilla is known for having some of the best beaches to swim in, and it didn’t disappoint. The water was crystal clear and pretty calm. It could’ve been a touch warmer, but I’m not really complaining. Throughout the day they kept bringing around little things – glasses of iced tea, shots of a vodka drink, sorbet, cold towels. Great service.
Around 2pm we were hungry so we made our way down to the Cap Shack for lunch. I had an Island Bowl with fried tofu, roasted jerk chickpeas, cabbage slaw, mango, rice and a passion fruit dressing. It was delicious. Tzvi had a pulled tuna burger and sweet potato fries, which he also really liked.
At some point during lunch Hallie’s math tutor and third grade teacher, Miss Shelby, started texting me that Hallie has a headache. Hallie really has things figured out. Whenever she needs something from me during school hours, she finds Shelby and has her text me. She’s very resourceful and has figured out that this works better than going through the hassle of visiting the school nurse and getting the office to contact me. There was only an hour and a half left in school so I sent Shir to pick her up early. Let’s hope there’s nothing really wrong with her.
We stayed on the beach until around 5pm, when we made our way down to the pool. The pool is really warm and great. We had rum punch and Diet Coke and swam for a while. They have these cool floating trays that hold your drinks and they actually work well. In the pool we met a young couple from Tennessee who had just gotten married, like last Saturday. I don’t understand how people get married and then leave for a honeymoon a day later. We also met a couple from Lakewood. Jews… we’re everywhere!
Finally it was after 6pm and we decided to go back to the room. We got ready for dinner and then walked back to the main building for dinner at Cips. We were seated again along the water and it was just beautiful looking out at the hotel lit up at night.
We started with drinks. I went with a simple mojito, but Tzvi had a type of martini that had muddled cherry tomatoes in it and was ginormous. It was weird. For food, they started us off with a delicious warm bread. Then we ordered way too much food. We started with a margarita pizza and Caesar salad that was made table-side. If that wasn’t enough appetizers we also the fried zucchini, which turned out to be a massive pile of stringy fried zucchini and were absolutely delicious. For mains (which we weren’t even hungry for), I had pasta with tomato sauce and Tzvi had paccheri (a large tube pasta) with tomato sauce and chunks of branzino. For dessert we had a warm chocolate cake that they poured warm chocolate over and a rum baba.
Since it was game 1 of the NBA finals, we put the game on Tzvi’s iPhone and watched while we ate. It was a very exciting game and a perfect setting to sit and watch. It was halftime when we finished our meal.
As we were finishing, we saw a couple walk through the restaurant. People were saying hello to him and he was giving fist bumps. When he turned around we realized it was LL Cool J. All I have to say is that he is a very large man.
We walked back to the main building and saw there were a few people sitting at the bar and watching the game. Before we arrived we had emailed and asked if they would be showing the game in a public setting, but they said they weren’t sure yet. It seems that they installed a tv in the bar just for this. Was it because of us? Who knows. We were pretty exhausted though so we decided to go back to our room and watch the end of the game in bed. Of course the Knicks won (by 10!) capping off a great day.
Thursday
We woke up too early again. If someone knows how to turn off my internal alarm clock let me know, although I suspect I need to wait until both kids are out of the house and in college for that to reset itself, although by then we’ll be old and be waking up to pee at all hours. Life is cruel sometimes.
At 756am we texted Shir, “Hi Hal. Love you, have a great day!”
She replied, “Hey, Lisa told me she is not gonna go to school today.”
“Oy, did she say what was wrong?”
“She said she has a headache.”
Ok, so a headache and she is continuing to find ways to manipulate people, this time it’s my mother and she’s convinced her she needs to stay home. Not great.
Anyway, we managed to get out early and hit the gym. I’m not sure what it says about the clientele of this resort that the gym was pretty crowded at 830am.
Throughout my one hour workout the trip slowly unraveled. Apparently Hallie had woken up around 12:30 with a low fever, and then was up and down. She’s convinced she woke up at 3 and never went back to sleep. Of course my mother was up until 5, but we can’t confidently say how much of that was Hallie’s fault and how much was that’s her general way of being. I was texting my mom back and forth and she made an appointment with the pediatrician for 12:30. In order to mentally escape this I decided to do a run on the treadmill, which I haven’t done since I hurt my foot. While it was short and a mix of running and walking, I have to say my foot didn’t hurt. Hooray for the small wins.
We then had an anxiety ridden breakfast, not that that stopped us from eating. Today we ordered the French toast, which was definitely bathed in some alcoholic custard. It was very good.
We walked back on the beach to the room, changed, and settled into our beach seats. Today we opted not to eat anywhere for lunch and got chips and guacamole on the beach. It was pretty good. From 1230-130 I was back and forth texting with my mom while she was at the pediatrician. And the diagnoses is… Flu B! At this point I was ready for my head to explode. Instead, I asked our server to please find me one of the drinks in a pineapple. It was leaking on the bottom, but it worked for me.
As it got later, it got a bit cooler and windier on our side of the bay so we opted to spend some time at the pool before going in and changing for dinner.
At 6pm we walked down to the lobby to watch the nightly Sabering ritual. When we arrived, the hotel manager was telling a story about a gardener at the hotel who dug a hole in the sand so a pregnant woman could lay with her belly in it and then she named the baby after him. I think it was George. Then they had guests open bottles of champagne using a saber. That was cool.
Tonight’s dinner was off property at the Four Seasons. When we were deciding where to stay, we looked at both the Belmond and the Four Seasons and ultimately decided on the Belmond because it’s smaller, more intimate and known for being less family friendly and more geared toward couples. Walking around the Four Seasons, we felt like we had made the right choice. It’s a beautiful resort, but there were kids all over the place and it felt kind of big and impersonal. I’m not sure the whole resort is actually bigger than ours, but the main lobby and the outdoor spaces just felt very large. We started with a drink at the Sunset Lounge, which is known for having really beautiful sunsets, except it was kind of cloudy so we didn’t get the famous Four Seasons Anguilla sunset. Oh well. Also, while this hotel feels more lively – there was a DJ at the lounge and it was pretty packed – the lounge was right next to the pool and there were lots of kids still swimming at 645 as we were having drinks.
The drinks were not memorable. Tzvi ordered something orange and I ordered something pink, except I didn’t particularly like mine and Tzvi’s matched my dress better so we switched. We recognized several people from our hotel, including a couple who were at the next table at last night’s dinner at Cips. We called them the tall couple because both the man and the woman had to be over six feet tall.
We sat for a half hour until it was time to go to dinner at Salt, the restaurant at the Four Seasons. Dinner was absolutely delicious, but I don’t recall much because I was just in my head about everything that was going on. Midway through dinner Hallie called us crying because she missed us and was lamenting that we wouldn’t all be together for Shabbat. Good luck to her in Seneca (though she claims that it’s different because her friends will be there).
[Tzvi: I’ll fill in the gaps where my wife has blocked out the meal. When we arrived at Salt, they brought us to a station where they filled little glasses with some sort of passion fruit drink and you had the option of adding rum or not. Yes please. Then we were seated, of course one table away from the tall couple from our hotel. To start, they brought around a cart with johnnycakes and butter and, of course, salt. There were different things that you could choose to add to the salt like herbs and fruits. We had one salt with parsley and rosemary and another salt with orange. Very tasty. For drinks Steph ordered something with passion fruit (they’re big on that here) and I ordered a rum drink that the menu said was “finished tableside,” although that just turned out to mean that they poured it out of the shaker at the table. Whomp whomp. For appetizers Steph had a pumpkin soup and I had a tuna ceviche. For the mains, I had a grilled grouper and Steph had a vegetable curry. We also got a side of peas and rice, which is the national dish of Anguilla apparently. We were so full by the end of it.]
For dessert we decided to order the warm chocolate cake, which they told us would take 15 minutes. No problem. After about 13 minutes they brought out a cake with a sparkler. At the same time they brought a few other people sparklers and sang Happy Birthday, but the Stevie Wonder version. I think that’s the only version they know here because last night we heard it as well. Do they think that’s the real Happy Birthday song? Anyway, the cake they brought us was not our chocolate cake. They told us it was a strawberry mousse cake and they wrote Happy Anniversary in chocolate. We weren’t sure if this was an extra dessert or if they had brought out the wrong dessert, but then after a few minutes they brought out the warm chocolate cake. It was delicious, but at this point we were ready to vomit.
Finally we got a cab and headed back to the hotel. One nice thing about this island is that no matter where you get a taxi you can charge it to your hotel. I’m not sure if the cab drivers love that, but hey, works for us! We also noticed that at the Four Seasons, they gave us a Cap Juluca pen to sign with and at at least one meal at Cap Juluca they gave us a Four Seasons pen. I guess it’ s a really small island and the pens get around.
We got a golf cart and went back to the room and went to sleep. Hopefully tomorrow I will find a way to relax.