Day 6 - Thursday, Seeking Sandals and Snorkling

On Thursday we had booked a snorkel trip for the afternoon so we planned to hang at the beach for the morning. We are at the Grendadian, a modestly priced all inclusive, but just down the beach was the more upscale Sandals resort.  You can't really walk the beach to Sandals since a large rock cleaved off the ledge and blocks the path. We were told by the staff that there was a time when you could walk to Sandals. I was a bit antsy for a hike anyway, so Donna and I  went to the desk and asked if they had hiking trails? This apparently was a strange question to them, why would you want to hike in this heat when you can lay by the ocean? Anyway, we got some general directions on how we might hike over to Sandals.  The directions were general, but we headed in that direction and Jean gave up the beach to join us. We hiked several miles in the sun down a road that went past the airport and eventually did hit the beach but we were south of Sandals and again cut off by rocks. Sandals has a section of beach that is completely closed to pedestrians from both sides and they will not let you walk in from the road, guess that is what people pay for.  So we turned around and started back, and it was hot.

We did go by the entrance but we are told they will not let you walk in.














 About two thirds of the way back we found a path that went in the woods towards the ocean, we had to follow it and it did come out on the beach between Sandals and the Grenadian.

On this road we came to an abandoned house that at one time was clearly an estate, complete with stone pillars and iron gate at the entrance.

We can only speculate that it was destroyed by Ivan and the property purchased by Sandals to further their exclusivity of this part of the ocean front.

We did make it to the Sandals beach, we did not intrude upon their direct water front, but we may just do that Friday.

We tried going north to see if we could find our way back to the Granadian, but were again closed off by rocks.  But it was a very cool beach empty of people.

Since this is a secluded beach it is not picked clean and the girls each found some coral.













We hiked back to the road and back to the Grenadian, a bit scorched but it was a good hike.

We made our way to the pool where lunch is served and on the way over saw this guy hanging on a rock by the small lake.

On our way back from lunch this guy was hanging in the grass.


Theses are not small lizards, both had bodies well over a foot long.











We boarded a shuttle to the snorkel trip we booked with 'First Impressions'.

The boat is a 60ft+ catarmaran sailboat. It has lots of room, we had about 30 people on board and it was not too crowded.













We snorkeled around a small rocky point first and then moved onto the Underwater Sculpture Park.

It has about 80 total concrete sculptures that are placed on the seafloor. Bob had an underwater camera and took some nice pictures. The sculptures range from a guy sitting at his desk to naked women (yeah!), interesting to say the least.

Irish people holding hands...no..I don't know what makes them Irish.

Woman praying.

It took some good swimming skills to do the tour since much of the time you were treading water while the guide spoke, we were all tired when we returned to the boat.












We had a nice time on the boat and as usual met a few interesting people from other parts of the world like Sweden and Nashua, New Hampshire.....

The views of St. George from the boat were spectacular.

A good time was had by all.









Friday is our last full day in Grenada, it goes by quickly. We will likely just Chillax at the beach.