So you want the low down on Barbados?  You wanna hear the stories of celebrity sightings, poisonous sea creatures and a dark man named Dark Man?  Here's the scoop.  After much debate we decided to hit a beach we knew little about--my trust Lonely Planet guide gave us precious little info in the Barbados chapter--but Crane Beach did come up as one of Barbados's best.  White sands, turquoise waters and no facilities made for a secluded setting, or so they told us.  Also, Mr. Handsome, who had made friends with every single person wearing a name tag on the cruise ship told us that our cruise activities director said Crane was amazing and worth any inconveniences.

We met us a taxi man who said his name was Dark Man.  He drove us quite aways along the southern side of the island and let us off at the end of a steep straight with directions to walk over the rocks to find the beach.  He would pick us up when we called him back on his cell phone.  Deal.

This is what we saw when we stepped out of the taxi and said goodbye to Dark Man.

This is the no facilities beach. Roughing it.









 (Flying Fish Sandwich.  Thank you Caribbean girl in the purple shirt with the Canadian accent.)

As you can see, the beach turned out to be amazing.  A. MAZ. ING.  The weather was gorgeous, the sand was crazy soft and the waves were just right for boogie boarding.  We had a great morning.  I thought we'd had everything we could ask for on this, our last day at port, a great way to wrap up an absolutely fabulous week.

 

 

 

Steph looks so radiant I had to share despite the closed eyes :)

 

But there was more adventures to come. . . 

So after we'd been there a while, a group of people arrived and took some seats not far from us, about 12 feet away or so.  I thought they looked like nice, attractive people who had the good fortune of having enough money in their pockets.  Something maybe about their clothes or they way their carried themselves?  I don't know exactly what bespoke the money part, maybe the man's hefty silver watch that he was wearing out in the surf.  They had some darling little kids, who looked to be straight out of a catalog.  White blonde curls sticking out from a sun hat and a little pail and shovel to dig in.  I thought those two little boys were quite cute.  Stephanie, however, thought their father was a movie star.

She suddenly whipsered, eyes wide, back now stiff: "Do you KNOW who that IS? Do NOT look, do NOT look."

I looked.


So the attractive family with plenty of cash is famous too.
But I am apparently not piped into the right circles as I do not recognize any of them and Stephanie is agonizing trying to figure out which celebrity has parked it right next to us.  I am no help;  I don't even subscribe to the Entertainment Tonight App, let alone the E! app.  Jill, too, has which movie he is in on the tip of her tongue.  They are adamant that I get a good shot of him with my zoom lens and I spend the next few moments trying to be the most discrete paparazzi on the planet.

I do not want to bother a famous person.  I am much too cool, calm and collected for that.  See, I don't even know who they are, right?  Jason figured out who he is, cuz with a job like his, you have to be in the know.  Leiv Shreiber.  He was the bad guy in Salt and was the Wolverine's brother in some X-Men movie.  I missed both of those, but he looked like a nice guy and a good dad.  I am intrigued to know he has stared with Hugh Jackman. I would have recognized that guy.


So I nab a few distant shots of some man's head out splashing in the surf to appease my lovely girlfriends and then I take to the waters myself.  These waves are just to perfect for boogie boarding to pass up!  I felt like a kid again riding the waves all the way into the shore, laughing my self silly at the simple exileration of it all.
 

 
And then, then when I was back out in waste deep water to catch more waves I was suddenly hit by a wave of acid fire spreading across my legs.  Hmmmm. . . .water is not supposed to feel like acid fire.  Something is definitely not right.  I looked down at my hand and saw a strand of deep blue threads sticking to my hand.  These threads were obviously pumping fire poisions into my body and a glance at the water to my left proved that I had been stung by some insidious ocean creature.

Holy Crap.  Do I pull these strings off of my hand with my other hand?  Will that just make the poison go into both hands now?  And my legs are on fire, fire I tell you!  I get those super fine threads of blue off of me and tear into the shore and exlaim, "I think I just got stung by a jelly fish!" to the first person who will listen.  The thoughts in my brain jumble in sincere panic, something like this:  I am from Arizona.  We don't have jelly fish there, just scorpions and WHAT THE HECK!  This kills like fire in my veins and do jelly fish kill people?  Didn't that crocodile man from Australia die from a jellyfish sting?

But I tried to play it calm.  No one around would have guessed these were my thoughts.  Stephanie kindly guided me to a nice man who cut coconuts with a machete.

He told me in his thick Caribbean accent that I needed to dry off my skin with a towel.  He hadn't yet told me if we needed to go to the hospital for any anti-venom so I was still in freak out mode.  I looked at his hand and he was holding some ointment--apparently this tube is going to save my life is what my mind is putting together when he says, "Can you put dat on yourself pleez, because I would love to do dat but dat would not be right.  No, not be right."

This seemed to wake me up.  Oh, of course.  Cortisone cream.  That's all a girl needs is a little cortisone cream and I will certainly put that on my legs myself sir as I can now see that there are lines of welts all along my upper thighs.

I decided to rest up a bit and read a book on the chair under the umbrella after that.  I had had plenty of time in the surf and was not going to risk any more jelly fish stings (which turned out to be a portugese man o war, a little googling taught me later).  Jill, Stephanie and I saw several more of these Porgugese stingers floating around and fished them out of the foamy surf and put them in the garbage can, so they would not sting somebody else.  (Ha.  Aren't we so motherly?!!)

But this is not the end of the story, oh no.  Remember that cute little boy with the shovel and pail? The one who's daddy is a movie star?  Well not long after my little episode that darling boy, the one who looked like he was out of a darling catalog started to scream, scream, scream!!  He is shrieking in pain. . . like his feet were on fire.  Fire in the water!  I know what that feels like.  He just got stung by a JELLY FISH!

Well of course I didn't let the fact that his father was famous stop me from running the few feet over to to blonde little cherub to tell his lovely mother (who was wearing a hat and sunglasses) that the man at the coconut stand has cortizone cream for the jellyfish stings.  She did not pay much attention to me and with a quick "yha, yha" I realized that she had this covered and did not need any advice from me.  I went back to my chair but was pleased to notice that they did get some cortisone for their little guy.

And a few mintues later Jason came back out of the surf and informed me that Leiv Shriver's long time partner is Naomi Watts and that was who I just spoke to.  Naomi Watts, a famous movie star that I have heard of, who happens to be from Australia--where everybody knows about jellyfish and portugese man o wars, and she vacations in Barbados regularly. I just thought someone like that might need a little advice from an Arizona girl like myself.


And so we said goodbye to Barbados at the end of one adventurous day!  I still have a chain of baby pearls seared into my leg from that Porguese Man o War (p-mow for short). As a post script, you should know that Dark Man went ballistic when we brought up Rhianna on the drive back to the boat.  Apparently she has done nothing for the children of the island or something like that.  We had to tie Tyler down to the back seat so he wouldn't go into a Libertarian political debate with the taxi driver.   We wouldn't want to miss our boat :)

 And you thought I was going to end this post with a picture of Liev Shreiber.  No, no, no.  Not after I got in tight with his girl Naomi.  You'll have to come to my house to see that one.