De Nueva: Bermuda!

Bermuda!

Alex and I have been doing LOTS of traveling this summer! After Montreal, we finally did get to use up our free Airtran vouchers and did in fact find somewhere tropical and awesome. After much discussion, we finally settled on Bermuda! We were originally wanting to do the DR or Puerto Rico, but decided against PR because we didn’t have enough time to really get to the parts of the island we’d be interested in and against the DR for basically the same reason and that Airtran only flies into Punta Cana, which is all inclusive resort central, which basically is about the grossest thing possible if you ask me. I’m kind of a travel snob/granola liberal in that I refuse to have anything to do with resort-y type places for a multitude of reasons. (If you’d like to know my reasons, I’m happy to share, but figured I’d leave the politics for another day.)

ANYWAYS, so yes, what we’d read about Bermuda sounded perfect, beautiful beaches, mopeds, and not so much into the huge hotel chains. And really, when else am I going to fly for a weekend to Bermuda unless hubs and I have free airfare? After figuring out we could book the flights we moved onto finding a place to stay, which was supposed to be easy peasy since there were some handy websites that had loads of apartment type rentals for cheap. However, these website are all basically through this company called Bermuda Rentals. Which, though has many cheap, lovely properties, was, in our experience, a freaking nightmare to book. I felt like I was pulling teeth just trying to give them money. I had to follow up SEVERAL times and had to keep calling them (which is annoying because they’re in Canada) instead of email. Finally, after several follow-ups, and a confirmation email that fell through, they emailed to say opps, sorry, even though you've been trying to book for over a MONTH we don't have any thing at all. In fact she said, "it looks like your reservation fell off a cliff." Umm, what? To which I wrote a very strongly worded email response saying, yes, so, that's not going to work for us. I also tweeted to say never EVER book with them.

The best part of all this was that I ended up feeling almost as cool as dooce, in that literally a few hours after I tweeted, I got the fastest response ever from these guys, at like 5am they sent an email saying, just kidding, they would most definitely find us somewhere to stay within our budget. Oh, and could you please update your twitter account to reflect that? Wow. Well then. I guess social media IS effective. I let them know there would be no changing of any statuses until we actually were booked and had gotten there without any hiccups.

The day arrived for our departure and Alex and I headed off to the airport at the ungodly hour of 3:45am. Only to be told once we arrived at La Guardia that our flight was canceled. Come back tomorrow! WHAT?? Seriously people, never fly on Air Tran if you can help it. LAME. We rebooked things so we could come back a day later and made arrangements with work, but still this was ridiculous.

The next day things fortunately went off without a hitch and we finally made it to beautiful Bermuda! The place we were staying also has their own taxi service, so we were even picked right up from the airport.

Our hosts for the weekend, Wade's Garden Inn were amazing in every way. If you head to Bermuda, I highly recommend them. Just book directly through them, not through another agency! They picked us up from the airport, gave us a tour of their little part of the island, took us to the grocery store to pick up food, and were just generally awesome. And their accommodations were spotless and beautiful, and just a walk over the hill or quick trolley ride from Horseshoe Beach!

Wade's Garden Inn

The bay around the corner from our Inn.

Beautiful orchids in our apartment.

The area we were staying in was purposefully away from the hubbub of town, we were going for as relaxing as possible, and that was what we got. We mainly spent our days relaxing at the beach or walking along the railroad trail enjoying the scenery. Since we stayed in an apartment we cooked our meals for breakfast and lunch, and then just went out for dinner, which made things much more affordable. Food is pretty pricey on the island.

We had hoped to rent mopeds, but for this trip, it was just a bit much. Next time for sure!

Horseshoe Beach. Of COURSE the day I brought my point and shoot to the beach I forgot to charge the batteries and it was dead. But, this is the view from the road of the beach we spent our days at. Alex couldn't get over how blue the water was and kept saying, "I can't believe a place like this actually exists!"
The second day we were out was busier then the first, but both were fairly low key. If you walked around to the far edge of the horseshoe, there would be hardly anyone. The first day we walked around the rocks at the end and found ourselves on a practically deserted stretch of sand, it was lovely.