BARBADOS — Day 5

January 24, 2011

I woke up at 10:30am and found this on the kitchen counter:

It was my mom’s handwriting. She and my half-sister Martha had gotten an early start to their action-packed day of…

…reading.

The photo above shows the view from my beach chair when I looked to the left. The next photo shows my view to the right:

Nothing special or life changing. Just nice. The scene in the following photo, however, is rather glorious:

The white building on the left (just a one-minute walk from our beach chairs) is a restaurant called Tides. We’d be eating dinner there at 7pm.

Ready for the random photo of the day? Check this out:

In case you can’t tell, it’s a guy walking his dog — and his monkey.

Martha and my mom and I took a break from the beach, ate lunch in our condo, and chilled on the back terrace:

We headed back to the beach at 4:30pm, half an hour before I was scheduled to go jet skiing.

Here I am in the late-afternoon sun:

I had a little time to kill, so I started building something in the sand:

Here’s my silly creation two minutes later:

I worked on it a bit more until it was time for the jet ski.

Remember the hand-shaped hair pattern on the back of my head?

I was still rockin’ it:

I got the quick safety briefing and then took off:

Here I am off in the distance:

Here’s a pixelated closeup of the previous photo:

The half-hour session flew by…

…and before I knew it, it was time to head back in:

I finished working on my sand sculpture:

Here I am with it:

Meanwhile, in New York:

I was so happy NOT to be bundled up:

I was also happy — overjoyed, in fact; thrilled beyond words — not to have to work on my book. I still can’t believe it’s done. I felt more free than ever, and I just wanted to run around and sing and dance and play.

As the sun began to disappear, Martha and my mom headed back to the condo. I stayed on the beach and built this:

It’s a three-foot-tall stack of rocks and pieces of coral…just because.

We had dinner at Tides, and it was uh-MAY-zing. Here’s a pic of my mom and Martha inside the restaurant…

…and here’s a four-part pic of the food I ate:

Let me tell you what everything is by quoting from the menu:

1) Sautéed Spiced Jumbo Shrimp & Thai Scented Crab Cakes – Served with a Red Curry Coconut Coriander Cream

(Are all those capital letters really necessary? No, of course not, but that’s how it was written, and let me tell you, the meal was so good that the whole menu deserved to be in ALL CAPS. Anyway, let’s proceed, shall we?)

2) Jamaican “Jerk” Pork Tenderloin – Wrapped in Parma Ham with Pesto Mash, Leek & Calvados Cream finished with caramelized Apples

(Holy shyte. Yes, it was as good as it sounds.)

3) Caramel Banana & Baileys Bread & Butter Pudding

(This was Martha’s dessert. It was the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my entire life, and she was kind enough to let me eat half of it.)

4) The Tides “Tidation” A Chocolate Lover’s Dream, Rich Chocolate Ganache scented with Cappuccino Coffee set on a flourless Chocolate Cake and glazed with a thick Chocolate Topping

(As Borat would say, “Wow-wow-WEE-wow!!”)

I’m not a so-called foodie. I don’t know anything about food. I can’t cook at all. I don’t ever eat like this unless someone else is paying for it (thanks, Mom!), but I can certainly appreciate a phenomenal meal to the point of getting giddy about it.

Phew.

Written by Zack Hample Posted in Dailies