Since it is winter in New England we decided to reserve a hotel near JFK instead of getting up really early and fighting the New York City rush hour traffic. We drove to the Sheraton Hotel @ JFK on Wednesday night. It is not a bad hotel, but the heating in the room was a bit strange. When we had the heat on it got cold, and when we turned the heat off it stayed warm. Jeff mentioned about it in the morning and they gave us free breakfast because of it. And they also gave us free parking for the night. We had a one way rental, which just this time happened to be free (good start for the holidays).
In the morning we dropped off the rental and took the Air Train from Federal Circle to Terminal 5. Jet Blue was on time too and the flight was smooth and uneventful but the plane was full. We took our son with us this time, since he had a 6 week break from university. Last year our daughter went with us.
When we landed at Provo, Jeff's brother Dave was waiting for us. For once we were lucky to go through the customs there really fast. They had just opened a new line and we were second and since we didn't have any checked luggage we just walked out, no waiting with our winter clothes on in that heat. When we got to Dave's place the girls were still in school and Denise was at work and she also had teacher conferences afterwards. When the girls got home we went to the Ocean Club's Cabana Bar and Grille for dinner.
Most of the days we went to the beach and Jeff and Matt did some snorkeling. We have our "own" little spot between Ocean Club and Club Med in front of the Providenciales Cultural Center (I think that's what it was called) towards the east end of Grace Bay. It's a yellow building with a restaurant and a few cute little shops run by local people. We usually came home for lunch and sat by the pool. Very relaxing vacation. During the week the girls had school, Denise had to work and Dave too, but he was able to drop by every so often. He also had Wednesday off and spent most of it with us. More about that later.
Saturday morning we went to see where Dessa takes riding lessons. She had been going to Provo Ponies for a few years now. We saw many of the horses they have and they had couple of new ones that were rescued from Grand Turk. Dessa rode Tuesday that day, but lately she has been riding Lil Joe, but he was hurt the day before and was taking a rest day.
We couldn't stay to watch her ride since we had to take Daniella to Long Bay Beach for her kite boarding. She has been doing it for awhile now and she also has it as a school activity, something completely different that you don't hear in New England. One of her friends came there too and helped her with her kite. She seems to be really good and was going quite fast. We were planning on staying on that beach for awhile and do some snorkeling and swimming there, but there were many kite boarders and they would have just run us over, so we went back to the Grace Bay Beach.
On Sunday Denise had booked us on a boat trip with Caicos Dream Tours. This is 4 hour tour that took us to dive for conch and snorkeling. It was a low tide so the conch diving was in a deeper area with 15 - 20 feet depths. There were about 20 people total on board and the ones who did dive got about 15 or so conch. Then we went to a coral reef area for snorkeling. There were lots of beautiful and colorful fish and Denise even saw four barracudas. After the snorkeling we were taken to Water Cay where they cleaned up all the conch. Those who wanted could take the empty shells home. We went for a short walk to see if we could find some of the iguanas that live on that cay. We did find couple and a neat tide pool with jelly fish and hermit crabs. When we got back to the boat they had cleaned most of the conch and were feeding the parts we wouldn't eat to two lemon sharks that came right on to the beach. We could almost touch them, luckily they are only about foot and a half to two feet long and would not attack people. It was really neat to see them so close. While everybody was ashore the captain had made fresh conch salad from the conch we caught. We ate the salad and had some more rum punch while heading back to Provo. Our boat dropped some people on their hotels so we ended up going by the marina and seeing some fancy, very expensive yachts and we also saw the boat we did a sunset and glow worm cruise last year.
Because eating out in Turks is very expensive we ended up cooking most of the meals at home. If you go to a "better" more expensive place you end up spending at least $100 per person. We did eat at the Cabana Bar and Grille at Ocean Club and had our cracked conch, The Provo Golf Club's Fairways Bar and Grille has amazing burgers. One of them is named after Dave (DD Full Monty Burger, and on our last night we ate at Mr. Grouper's Restaurant. We also visited Caicos Bakery often. It is a French bakery with really good baguettes and pastries. One night we had a take out from Flamingo Cafe aka Ricky's for their steamed grouper. It is very expensive even to cook at home. One night we made two pans of lasagna and even the ingredients for that with two bottles of wine was just over $100.
Wednesday Dave had a day off and we went golfing. Well the guys did, I have a sore right shoulder (turned out to be frozen shoulder) and I didn't want to aggravate it any more so I just went for the ride. It is nice to have a brother in law who is the golf pro at Provo Golf Club. It's easier to get a tee off time that way. They played 9 holes, but we did take a little break after 7 and I didn't go back. Jeff and Dave played a few more holes after that while Matt came home after the 9 holes. They had a few dozen flamingos on the course but unfortunately they were all really far away, but I was able to take a few half decent pictures of them.
Friday was our last night there and we went out to Mr Grouper's Restaurant. It is more of a local place, but has tourists too. Food was quite good, even though my sides were not exactly what I ordered, but it seems to be a normal thing on the islands. There was at least one cat, or more like a kitten begging food from table to table. He/she liked to be petted but didn't want to come up and also crapped the piece of fish I gave it really fast.
It was sad to leave the relaxing pace of the island and come back to the cold weather. Our trip actually happened at the perfect time. There were delayed flights (Jet Blue had actually canceled all it's flights) just couple of days before we left and a big snow storm couple days after we got back.
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