Hellooooo!!!!
Have just come back from another fab week in Miami and the Turks & Caicos islands, (much better than the Terms & Conditions Islands), mind full of turquoise water as I retune into reality.
I just love Janine's and my girls’ weeks away. And it is still totally inexplicable why doing different versions of a very tried & tested theme – shopping, bars, more shopping, beige food, cocktails then beaches, clear water, white sand, fishies, seafood, rum cocktails etc etc – works so well, for the woman who is usually all about discovering new places and experiences. Hey Ho, it certainly isn’t broke so deffo no need to fix it. Apart from perhaps my margarita tolerance – having had 3 on the bounce in this cute place called Minibar, I spent the entire night groaning, a unique sound that only margaritas seems to bring out in me..
We stayed at the Anglers on Miami Beach for – who knows, the 8th? – time and am very chuffed to be hauling home two bags full of newly purchased mostly clothing goodies. Nothing fancy, you know me, but Macy’s certainly has emptier shelves than before we hit town as wells a few other shopping favourites..
Didn’t get up to a whole lot of anything else beyond scouring several different malls and stocking up on random bits like washbag scents from Old Navy (surprisingly good!), pots of ibuprofen from Walgreens and of course, the essential bag of twisted Cheetos to go with the gin & cards pre-dinner island ritual.
And laughing as ever at the many bizarre Miami beach outfits – mostly of very scantily clad large women, but this guy with his shorts round his knees and what looked like a grenade strapped to his arse (in my sister's-law, Mel's opinion) had me saying 'Really??!!" many a time. I mean – 'really?!!!'
And we were bloody lucky with the weather. We couldn’t believe our imminent terrible luck, when two days before our trip, Miami was reporting ‘life-threatening and catastrophic’ rainfall and a state of emergency. Amazingly luckily, it blew through quickly and my concerns about not being able to drive from the airport to the hotel and possible alligators roaming the wet streets wereunfounded.
Ditto in the T&Cs – first pic here taken from the plane as we flew in, oh yes, stunning views. Which were delightfully replicated on our nearest beach, Grace Bay, where we had our own sunbeds & brolly that came with our AirBNB villa rental – easy peasy and def so much nicer than the big American style family hotels. A couple of storms passed through, but nothing worse than having to move a dinner to indoors resulted. We had a fab half day boat trip out to the reef for snorkelling (trying to ignore the fact that a Canadian guy had lost a leg in a bull shark attack 4 weeks previously, eek), visiting the baking lizard population on Iguana Island, dipping in the stunning sea and definitely not daring to go down the slide from the boat upper deck. Maybe ten years ago..
All in all, 8 lovely days slipped by seamlessly. I am now homeless for the next 3 weeks while 3 ladies from the WTA are renting Dora, so it was back to Janine’s when we landed for the night – thank you Ross for the welcome home roast chicken – and now we are staying at Fi & Rich’s in Henfield, looking after their animals while they head to Glasto for a whole week of music and madness, a very handy timing coincidence. Finally, we are off to Croatia, my first trip out to ‘our boat’ now H has a half share in London Lady. Painful memories of breaking my 4 ribs on there 2 years ago will hopefully be replaced with better ones (it won’t be hard!)
And it finally seems that summer has finally shown its overdue face in the UK too, hurrah. First 2 lots of exciting holiday washing are drying at warp speed in the garden sunshine and we've robbed the local butchers of all his meat for a few BBQs while we're here.
Blighty, it's good to see you with your sunhat on x