Friends and flexible travelers,
You know YUD loves airplanes, and airports, and just about everything to do with air travel. Especially lines. And bureaucracy.
On the train. This is the second time in about a month—and I have yet another trip booked via rail before September is out. Seems to be becoming a habit, perhaps for good reason—train travel is so much more convenient and relaxing and hassle-free than plane travel these days (see Airlines, Delta).
Even unemployed peoples, if you plan ahead by 14 days (hard to do being as carefree and fly-by-the-seat-of-our-unemployment-jeans as we are), but if you can manage it, tickets to Boston and Washington DC and other Northeasterly places somewhat nearish NYC are just $50 each way.
View from the restaurant
How things are different in Jamaica:
10 p.m. – go to sleep with my face in Motherless Brooklyn, exhausted from flight and travel plus delicious steamed fish meal (to which I mistakenly applied FAR too much REALLY REALLY hot sauce through nobody’s fault but my own cause it did say so right on the label) and a generous supply of cooling Red Stripes.
I’ll keep this one short, kids, as I am being fed diet cokes by the friendly bar staff as I overlook the blue blue Jamaica water from the WiFi-ified restaurant lounge and I’m going to have to float out of here pretty soon, or at least continue my work on my base tan and take some pictures for you to see for yourself. Flew in this am on the 7:55 (alarms were set and went off; arrival was on-time even though I’d conveniently “forgotten” my travel was international and therefore check-in closed 60 minutes prior to departure time. Your Unemployed Daughter is growin’ up! Sorta?)
I’ve seen a dolphin and several goat packs, spent an hour and a half through village roads with my driver Duane (falling asleep to Bob Marley on the way), hit 3 ATMs before locating a working one that paid in U.S. dollars, learned the conversion rate but not the name of Jamaican money, interacted with a fellow hotel guest who has had her hair questionably braided, found my Internet connection, and, now, completed my daily job search/email check (see Mom? Dad?) to no avail whatsoever.
But in this case no avail is perhaps the best avail, and as good a sign as any that I should put my name in the book for a massage tomorrow, take an open-air shower, and head for happy hour. Half-priced drinks? How could a jobless gal say no? And why would she?
