SlickTony
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- May 25, 2002
- Posts
- 6,344
Last month my husband and I went to Jamaica for our 30th anniversary. We went to one of the Couples resorts--Couples Tower Island--since we weren't about to take our son with us. (He stayed home and held the fort). You probably all know how an all-inclusive resort works--all the food and drink, and most of the activities, except for things like massages and the stuff in the gift shops, are included. At the Couples resorts, only couples get to stay in them.
One of the loveliest things about Tower Island its its island, a few hundred feet off the mainland, which has, in fact, an actual tower on it. It features a few pavilions and a swim-up bar. And clothing is forbidden. You are expected to remove them, except, perhaps for your sandals if you are tender-footed, as soon as you get there. A shuttle runs back and forth to the island all day until 5:00. I had prepared for this part of the adventure by frequent sessions in a tanning salon, so by the time our vacation was over, I had an all-over tan. I had never had suntanned breasts in my life and as absurd as it might sound, I'm kind of proud of them.
You might remember that last time we went to Jamaica, we got our Open Water certification; that was in '07. We did try to go diving in '08, but it was not successful: we did it locally, and the viz was only about 15 feet or so, and our son got seasick, and I got a terrible nosebleed trying to equalize my ears, and the dive masters would not let me use my second tank. They informed us rather acerbically that if we didn't dive any more often than we did, we should have done some spring diving as a sort of refresher and shouldn't have tried doing it in the ocean. Remembering that, we sprang for a refresher court at the resort, and as soon as we got done with that, we went out for our first dive.
This dive, and the other ones that succeeded it, was a lot better than any of the other ones we'd been on. If you don't dive all the time, you can hardly do better than to put yourself in the hands of Jamaican resort divemasters--they are vigilant and patient and do all they can to make sure you are safe and comfortable. I would say that the guy who certified us at Boscobel in '07 and the guys we went diving with at CTI were on a par with each other. However, there's hardly any comparison between the dive sites we went on.
Having dived at Dickie's Reef and the other one we went to--I forget its name--I can see now that the ones we went to year before last were quite sick. The ones we went to this time had much better coral formations, and lots more colorful fish, and a total absence of the little y-shaped bone-looking things that had littered the sea floor at Student Reef, and which I have concluded were pieces of dead coral skeleton.
Compared to the last two times I dived, I had hardly any problems getting my ears equalized; in very little time I was able to swim about comfortably. On the third day, we saw a sea turtle. The sea around Ocho Rios is not supposed to be as famous for sea turtle sightings as around Negil, but we saw one. Considering that things in the water look bigger than they do on land, I'd say that the turtle might have been the size of one of these inexpensive 3-legged round tables you buy and then immediately put a cloth on. When later I told my boss at work I'd seen a sea turtle, he asked me if it was a loggerhead or a leatherback. I couldn't tell--the angle at which it was swimming, I saw its stomach more than its back. We went down as far as 75 feet. I think we're technically only certified to 65, but hey, we were with the dive master--he said he could.
The paid-for activities included a trip to Dunn's River Falls and horseback riding, but when the first day of diving was so fun and successful, I didn't want to do anything else--besides, we had taken to going to the Island every day right after we'd gotten off the boat and hung our skinsuits to dry. We established a schedule: my husband would play tennis from 8:00 to 9:00, and then we'd meet at the dive shop, and get back from our dive around 11:00, and then we'd go to the Island until lunch. Before long we were returning to the island after lunch and staying there until we had to evacuate the place at 5:00.
We had such fun on the Island--we mostly hung out in the swim-up bar, ordering boat drinks and chatting with our new friends. We met some very congenial people there. And we didn't have to worry about having perfect bodies--hardly anybody else's was. And anyway, melanin covers a multitude of sins. The only part of my body that didn't get tanned was my butt, and that's because I didn't lie on a chaise and get baked--that's hot, and boring as shit, IMO. (I've since gone back to the tanning salon to try to make up for this deficiency). We learned that some of the people there are veterans of the place--they have returned to it year after year, for decades, like the swallows of Capistrano.
We would generally leave the Island around 1:00 to go to the mainland and eat lunch, as the Patio restaurant, the only one besides the Poolside Grill that serves lunch, closes at 2:00. On Tuesday we had just finished lunch and were fixing to leave the patio when I saw one of the couples we'd met on the island at another table, tuning up a guitar and a fiddle. I went over to them. My husband said, "Leave the musicians alone," but I ignored that. (He said afterwards that he hadn't recognized our friends with their clothes on). We got talking about music, and next, we were singing "Seven Bridges Road" right there in the restaurant. Our new friends said that they were going to jam for two nights in the piano bar, and I had to join them.
I'd been in the Piano Bar the other nights--this is something I've never seen anywhere but a resort. It's pretty much fun, allowing for the fact that you're limited to the songs in the books and they are generally keyed to accommodate the untrained voices of the vast majority of people who hang out there. The two nights I spent jamming with my new friends were even better. I have a knack for harmonizing with practically anything, extemporaneously. It was a lot more fun doing this with only three other people--the other couple plus the piano player, than it had been with a half dozen other people. Someone asked me if I sang professionally. My friends are in a band at home, so they do.
I only had problems on my last day of diving--I'd been using this one weight belt for the last couple of days, and someone had switched out some of the weights, so that when I went down I wasn't carrying enough weight. Consequently I spent most of the time I kept finding myself drifting towards the surface and kicking like hell to get back to the bottom. My hamstrings have been giving me hell ever since and I've had to go back to the chiropractor twice for massages. The massages at the chiropractor were much cheaper than they'd have been if I'd had them at the spa.
On our last full day, instead of going to the island in the afternoon, we went on the catamaran cruise we'd reserved. That was nice. The feasibility of doing this had been in some doubt, due to the 8' swells, so that the captain hadn't wanted to tie up to the dock. They ended up shuttling us out to the catamaran in bunches, in the glass-bottomed boat. My husband had been afraid of getting seasick, but for some reason, he didn't get seasick once.
It is apparently the custom for the catamaran to round the Island--and traditional, also, for the people on the Island to lob water balloons at the catamaran with big slingshots. The slingshots worked better than the Islanders anticipated--most of the balloons went over the boat. The catamaran took us to a place called No Problem Cove. The water was completely calm here, and you could jump off the cat and swim around. This was the only time I spent any amount of time at the surface. On the way back, I had three braids put in my hair by one of the catamaran crew.
All the food we ate was superb--so much so, that by the time we left, we kind of missed hunger, as well as relative sobriety.
We'd planned to use Sunday unwind, rest up and catch up with laundry, but when we tried to take off Saturday, our flight was canceled because the plane had a flat tire. They put us up at the Grand Palladium, the newest and biggest resort in Jamaica, and it was a lot better than sleeping at the airport, but we didn't like it near as well as the place where we'd stayed. The food was great, as good as the place where we stayed. It was too big, too impersonal, and too corporate--plus, they had some energy-saving ploys that came across as skinflint and parsimonious: You had to put your key card in the slot in the room for the lights to stay on. Toplessness was forbidden everywhere. I suppose the fact that it was a "family" sort of place had something to do with it. I've never been able to understand why kids are supposed to be traumatized at the mere sight of a breast. One thing I can say for this place was that I was able to get a sarong for a reasonable price, and two books--one on how to understand Jamaican patois and a book of Jamaican erotic tales.
The airline had said they were going to be working on getting our connecting flights, but when we got to Sangster on Saturday, they'd done nothing, and were scrambling to find each of us a connecting flight as we got up to the gate.
We finally got home at 12:45 Monday morning, after which I had to get up and go to work.
We're already plotting how we're going to get back to CTI in Jamaica. Anybody here who can get up the scratch to do it, I recommend they give it a shot. I definitely recommend it.
One of the loveliest things about Tower Island its its island, a few hundred feet off the mainland, which has, in fact, an actual tower on it. It features a few pavilions and a swim-up bar. And clothing is forbidden. You are expected to remove them, except, perhaps for your sandals if you are tender-footed, as soon as you get there. A shuttle runs back and forth to the island all day until 5:00. I had prepared for this part of the adventure by frequent sessions in a tanning salon, so by the time our vacation was over, I had an all-over tan. I had never had suntanned breasts in my life and as absurd as it might sound, I'm kind of proud of them.
You might remember that last time we went to Jamaica, we got our Open Water certification; that was in '07. We did try to go diving in '08, but it was not successful: we did it locally, and the viz was only about 15 feet or so, and our son got seasick, and I got a terrible nosebleed trying to equalize my ears, and the dive masters would not let me use my second tank. They informed us rather acerbically that if we didn't dive any more often than we did, we should have done some spring diving as a sort of refresher and shouldn't have tried doing it in the ocean. Remembering that, we sprang for a refresher court at the resort, and as soon as we got done with that, we went out for our first dive.
This dive, and the other ones that succeeded it, was a lot better than any of the other ones we'd been on. If you don't dive all the time, you can hardly do better than to put yourself in the hands of Jamaican resort divemasters--they are vigilant and patient and do all they can to make sure you are safe and comfortable. I would say that the guy who certified us at Boscobel in '07 and the guys we went diving with at CTI were on a par with each other. However, there's hardly any comparison between the dive sites we went on.
Having dived at Dickie's Reef and the other one we went to--I forget its name--I can see now that the ones we went to year before last were quite sick. The ones we went to this time had much better coral formations, and lots more colorful fish, and a total absence of the little y-shaped bone-looking things that had littered the sea floor at Student Reef, and which I have concluded were pieces of dead coral skeleton.
Compared to the last two times I dived, I had hardly any problems getting my ears equalized; in very little time I was able to swim about comfortably. On the third day, we saw a sea turtle. The sea around Ocho Rios is not supposed to be as famous for sea turtle sightings as around Negil, but we saw one. Considering that things in the water look bigger than they do on land, I'd say that the turtle might have been the size of one of these inexpensive 3-legged round tables you buy and then immediately put a cloth on. When later I told my boss at work I'd seen a sea turtle, he asked me if it was a loggerhead or a leatherback. I couldn't tell--the angle at which it was swimming, I saw its stomach more than its back. We went down as far as 75 feet. I think we're technically only certified to 65, but hey, we were with the dive master--he said he could.
The paid-for activities included a trip to Dunn's River Falls and horseback riding, but when the first day of diving was so fun and successful, I didn't want to do anything else--besides, we had taken to going to the Island every day right after we'd gotten off the boat and hung our skinsuits to dry. We established a schedule: my husband would play tennis from 8:00 to 9:00, and then we'd meet at the dive shop, and get back from our dive around 11:00, and then we'd go to the Island until lunch. Before long we were returning to the island after lunch and staying there until we had to evacuate the place at 5:00.
We had such fun on the Island--we mostly hung out in the swim-up bar, ordering boat drinks and chatting with our new friends. We met some very congenial people there. And we didn't have to worry about having perfect bodies--hardly anybody else's was. And anyway, melanin covers a multitude of sins. The only part of my body that didn't get tanned was my butt, and that's because I didn't lie on a chaise and get baked--that's hot, and boring as shit, IMO. (I've since gone back to the tanning salon to try to make up for this deficiency). We learned that some of the people there are veterans of the place--they have returned to it year after year, for decades, like the swallows of Capistrano.
We would generally leave the Island around 1:00 to go to the mainland and eat lunch, as the Patio restaurant, the only one besides the Poolside Grill that serves lunch, closes at 2:00. On Tuesday we had just finished lunch and were fixing to leave the patio when I saw one of the couples we'd met on the island at another table, tuning up a guitar and a fiddle. I went over to them. My husband said, "Leave the musicians alone," but I ignored that. (He said afterwards that he hadn't recognized our friends with their clothes on). We got talking about music, and next, we were singing "Seven Bridges Road" right there in the restaurant. Our new friends said that they were going to jam for two nights in the piano bar, and I had to join them.
I'd been in the Piano Bar the other nights--this is something I've never seen anywhere but a resort. It's pretty much fun, allowing for the fact that you're limited to the songs in the books and they are generally keyed to accommodate the untrained voices of the vast majority of people who hang out there. The two nights I spent jamming with my new friends were even better. I have a knack for harmonizing with practically anything, extemporaneously. It was a lot more fun doing this with only three other people--the other couple plus the piano player, than it had been with a half dozen other people. Someone asked me if I sang professionally. My friends are in a band at home, so they do.
I only had problems on my last day of diving--I'd been using this one weight belt for the last couple of days, and someone had switched out some of the weights, so that when I went down I wasn't carrying enough weight. Consequently I spent most of the time I kept finding myself drifting towards the surface and kicking like hell to get back to the bottom. My hamstrings have been giving me hell ever since and I've had to go back to the chiropractor twice for massages. The massages at the chiropractor were much cheaper than they'd have been if I'd had them at the spa.
On our last full day, instead of going to the island in the afternoon, we went on the catamaran cruise we'd reserved. That was nice. The feasibility of doing this had been in some doubt, due to the 8' swells, so that the captain hadn't wanted to tie up to the dock. They ended up shuttling us out to the catamaran in bunches, in the glass-bottomed boat. My husband had been afraid of getting seasick, but for some reason, he didn't get seasick once.
It is apparently the custom for the catamaran to round the Island--and traditional, also, for the people on the Island to lob water balloons at the catamaran with big slingshots. The slingshots worked better than the Islanders anticipated--most of the balloons went over the boat. The catamaran took us to a place called No Problem Cove. The water was completely calm here, and you could jump off the cat and swim around. This was the only time I spent any amount of time at the surface. On the way back, I had three braids put in my hair by one of the catamaran crew.
All the food we ate was superb--so much so, that by the time we left, we kind of missed hunger, as well as relative sobriety.
We'd planned to use Sunday unwind, rest up and catch up with laundry, but when we tried to take off Saturday, our flight was canceled because the plane had a flat tire. They put us up at the Grand Palladium, the newest and biggest resort in Jamaica, and it was a lot better than sleeping at the airport, but we didn't like it near as well as the place where we'd stayed. The food was great, as good as the place where we stayed. It was too big, too impersonal, and too corporate--plus, they had some energy-saving ploys that came across as skinflint and parsimonious: You had to put your key card in the slot in the room for the lights to stay on. Toplessness was forbidden everywhere. I suppose the fact that it was a "family" sort of place had something to do with it. I've never been able to understand why kids are supposed to be traumatized at the mere sight of a breast. One thing I can say for this place was that I was able to get a sarong for a reasonable price, and two books--one on how to understand Jamaican patois and a book of Jamaican erotic tales.
The airline had said they were going to be working on getting our connecting flights, but when we got to Sangster on Saturday, they'd done nothing, and were scrambling to find each of us a connecting flight as we got up to the gate.
We finally got home at 12:45 Monday morning, after which I had to get up and go to work.
We're already plotting how we're going to get back to CTI in Jamaica. Anybody here who can get up the scratch to do it, I recommend they give it a shot. I definitely recommend it.
Hubby and I did the all-inclusive, couples only vacay in Jamaica when we were dating and I loved it. I have vivid memories of dancing naked on the balcony to Bob Marley. 
