What a week we had! As you know, we left for sunny St Lucia last Friday evening. We had a layover in Atlanta before boarding the plane to St Lucia on Saturday morning. Our excitement mounted as we approached the island. Little did we know that despite being such a small island (14 miles by 27 miles) the drive from the airport to the resort took an hour and followed very narrow, windy, mountain roads. This was an adventure in itself! When we finally arrived at the resort, we were in for a bit of a disappointment. Although the resort was beautiful, our suite left much to be desired. The best way I can describe it is to refer to Revenge of the Nerds II. If you have seen this movie, you will understand. After the nerds are forced to leave the beautiful hotel, they wind up staying in that dive where an alligator lives in the pool. I kid you not, this was our impression of our first suite. Perhaps you notice I said "first" suite. This is because we decided on the spot that we would not stay in that room. We immediately contacted the concierge and asked for a new room - we offered to pay whatever they wanted but told them we would not stay in that suite. Originally, they were less than helpful, so we marched back into the concierge office and told them that if there was no other room available, we would be leaving on the first available flight. We explained that the suite we booked was based on their descriptions and pictures from the website. While they would have loved to have disputed this with us, we pulled out the Blackberry, went to the Sandals website and showed them pictures of the suite. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words . . . we were provided another suite that was quite lovely as you can see from the pictures. If only our troubles ended there. Unfortunately, we spent the majority of the vacation having to be the squeeky wheels just to get basic service such as housekeeping. We are not sure what the deal was, but it appeared that we fell through the cracks and were forgotten. We even had to hassle them on our last day to get our checkout documents (which were supposed to be provided the day before departing). To top it off, we called for bellman assistance with our bags (as was required by the resort's policy) and they failed to arrive after an hour so Garrett carried our bags to the Concierge office where he was told by the manager that he did not need to do that. Well Garrett explained that it appeared no one else was going to do it. The manager was speechless. This may have turned out to be a good thing because fifteen minutes later, he informed us that they had hired a private car to take us to the airport so that we would not have to ride the shuttle. This was a nice touch but a case of too little, too late. I think perhaps they were concerned about the evalutation form, and rightfully so. We had much fun filling out that form. This is not to say that our vacation was a bust, it was not. We had a wonderful time together, made some new friends, and have great tans. Our time to just relax by the pool and on the beach was what we were looking forward to most going into the trip and in that regard, the trip was perfect. St Lucia was also a very beautiful island so it made for a wonderful backdrop in all our pictures!
Kayaking fun . . .
Always fun to dress up for a night out :)
I am not convinced that Sandals is terrible, after all we had the best time at Sandals Negril on our honeymoon, however, I strongly discourage anyone from visiting any Sandals in St Lucia as the customer service was a notch below where it should be.
We arrived home early this morning due to airport closings in the Southeast last night. It was a long day of travel but Salem was thrilled to see us and it felt so good to get even a couple of hours sleep in our own bed. Now we are just getting back to the fun of work and cleaning up the house. Fortunately, we came home to warm, sunny weather.
On a completely different note, we would like to welcome our newest little Johnson (Aubrey Danielle) to the world. Our wonderful friends, Justin and Tiffini Johnson, welcomed their second little girl into this world on April 15th. Big sister Taylor is quite impressed and a perfect little helper. We will be flying to Las Vegas in August to meet our new "niece" and cannot wait!
We hope you all had a Happy Easter and are enjoying your Spring!
