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The first day of our vacation was very long… We left home around 10 PM on the Sunday night to catch an 11:30 PM flight to Toronto. A 4 hour flight led to a 3 hour layover before another 4 hour flight. Just when you think you are almost there, you realize that the line-up for immigration and customs snakes for what seems like miles through the airport. Ouch. But somehow we were told to ignore that line and to go stand in the much shorter lineup for locals only! I’m guessing the normal line would have taken at least an hour, while ours took 10 minutes!!

We still weren’t there yet though… there was still a two hour bus ride from the airport to the resort. I knew that I was going to love Jamaica when I discovered that we could buy beer through the window of the bus when we stopped at an intersection. Such a civilized country!!

We finally arrived at the resort and got into our room just in time to enjoy a  beautiful Caribbean sunset.  Our room looked out over a nice garden, onto the beach, and out into the Sea.  The resort we chose is actually quite small and every room has a view of the water.  Obviously some views were better than others, but everyone could see the sunset from their balcony.

We were all very hungry and quickly made our way down for dinner. The food was very nice and we had a table on the patio beside the pool, with a clear view of the main stage.  We quickly realized that everything in the Beaches catalogs about vacationing with Sesame Street was more than just hype.  Most of the main Sesame Street characters were there to put on a show for everyone.  Melanie was extremely excited and could hardly contain herself.  Actually her shorts were way too big and they couldn’t contain her!  After the show was over she made her way onto the stage to dance with some of the other kids and soon had her shorts around her ankles.  She barely noticed though and kept on dancing!

We ended the day with a stroll along the beach.  We didn’t go for a swim, but we did dip our toes in the water.  Everyone was exhausted and we all headed back to the room for an early bedtime…  except that there was no crib in the room.  We had called down to ask for a crib twice already, so this time I just walked directly to the front desk to impress upon them how tired we all were.  It turned out that there were nor cribs available.

I could write pages about this, but to cut a long story short, we were told that the resort was “overbooked” with very young children, and there were no cribs available.   After speaking with the Duty Manager a couple of times, we were finally able to impress upon him that our10 month old son would either be sleeping in a drawer or in the bathtub.  A couple of times he said something along the lines of “Oh, don’t do that”, wihtou actually providing us with an alternative.  Eventually he agreed to get a crib out of the Nursery (baby camp as Melanie called it) and bring it up.  That finally arrived at 11 PM.  It was a typical permanent crib like you might have in your home, and therefore not very portable, so they had taken it apart and had to put it back together while we waited.

We were very thankful that they went to the trouble, but also exhausted, frustrated, and angry all at the same time.  It was a rough end to a very long day.  We were confident that it was only going to get better though, so we happily went to bed with dreams of the beach in our heads!