Grenada~~Island Tour

It ended all too soon.  It seems like I have been home much longer than a couple of days.  We have gotten a lot accomplished since we got home.

The pool is opened and should be ready for us by the end of the week.  The laundry is done, the lawn is mowed.  We've spent each day with our Little Miss and we went out and got all the supplies to start painting the renovated back room.

I found a few minutes to go through the photos from our Island Tour on the last day of our vacation.  I will share those with you now.  We loved our time in Grenada.  Most of our time was spent at True Blue Bay Resort.  They say their mission is to keep their guests happy and they certainly do.  Very friendly and accommodating staff.

Our mornings were spent diving with Aquanuts.  This is, without a doubt, one of the best dive teams we have had the pleasure of spending a week with.  They pampered us completely.  We didn't even have to take care of our own wetsuits.  They did it all.  Each morning we would get to the boat and our gear would be all set up, ready and waiting to go.  Bugsy, Bruce, Crispin and Dennis couldn't have done anything that would have made this dive experience any better.

Friday morning, our last full day, there was no diving.  We slept in, had a leisurely breakfast and then met in the lobby at 9 am to tour the Island.  Grenada is 12 miles wide by 21 miles long but you would think it was much larger.  It is very mountainous so there is a lot of land above sea level in that short distance.

There are 6 Parishes on the Island.  We visited 5 of them.  Each little town we drove through has their Farmer's Market going on Fridays and Saturdays.  St. George is the largest city on the Island. Their Farmer's Market rivaled our Eastern Market here in Detroit.

Much of the roadside is decorated with the Grenadian colors of red/green/yellow.  There are handwritten signs of goodwill and charity everywhere you look.  The USA is well loved by Grenadians and they made it very clear that our tourism is appreciated and needed.

Our first stop was a beautiful waterfall where we cooled off a bit and stretched our legs after the trek out of St. Georges which was very heavily congested with traffic.

Our next stop was the Spice House.  This plantation used to employ over 300 people.  In a four year period, the owner, worried that he was going to lose the business due to political uprisings, let the plantation go and it now only has 20 employees.

Grenada is known as the Spice Island.  It used to be the 2nd largest exporter of nutmeg in the world but a hurricane took out many of it trees, knocking it down to #8.  They also export cloves, bay leaf, cinnamon, turmeric, and allspice.

This was followed by a stop at the Chocolate Factory. Cocoa is also a huge crop for Grenada and is imported to other countries.  The picture on the bottom left shows a cocoa fruit from which the beans are taken.  They are then placed in drawers and covered with banana leaves being turned and stirred each day until they turn a golden brown.  Then they are machine sorted for size before being hand sorted for any imperfections before being roasted and becoming the products that we know and love.

Lunch was enjoyed at a mountain top restaurant at this rum distillery.  After lunch we enjoyed a tour of the distillery, which is the only distillery on the Island that still presses and makes rum in the same manner as when it first opened in the 1800's.  This was followed up by a rum tasting.

The ride back took us past this fort where the USA battled with Grenada.  We called this an invasion.  93% of the Grenadians called this a rescue mission for which they are very grateful, celebrating it each year with a day they call Thanksgiving.

It was a very long, full day.  Dinner was ready upon our return to the resort and then we headed to the room to pack up and get ready for our return home the following day.