My Year(s) on the Road - Part Four (Section A?)

I know, I know.  This is a new year, but I'm going to keep with my "Year on the Road" series because this blog needs some sort of continuity, and this may be our only hope.

So I just got back from my first real trip of this year, Bermuda.  WOO!  I left from Baltimore with my girlfriend and her family and I'll admit, I was pretty nervous ya know.  I was about to meet a bunch of people I had never met before, and if they didn't like me, I'd be on a boat with them for a week.

Luckily, they were all awesome, I don't know how they felt about me, but I liked them.

So as we sailed out of Baltimore, the party started.  There's something truly epic about watching a giant cruise ship sail under the Key Bridge with only a few feet of clearance to spare.  And then I started drinking and everything became a blur, not really though.

-- Editor's Note / I start a lot of paragraphs with "So".  That is all. --

It was roughly a day and a half long sail to Bermuda, and if you know anything about cruise ships, there's always something to do.  We drank, ate, napped, walked around the decks, watched a movie, and went to karaoke.  Now, I had never been to karaoke before, the closest I had come was in "Rush Hour 2" when Chris Tucker sings in the bar.


Let me tell you, it was awesome.  Epic-ly unforgettable.  Ah-ma-zing.


First, Kelly's uncle came up and blew the roof off the place with Bad Company's "Feel Like Making Love", and everything that followed sucked terribly compared to the opening act.  Hooray for my brutal "Cruise Karaoke" critique.

My first friend in Bermuda.

After the day and a half, on a Sunday afternoon, we made it to Bermuda.  We hung off the rails and watched the ship dock before grabbing some lunch and lining up to leave and go to Horseshoe Beach, one of the top ten beaches in the world, to see crazy stuff like really blue water and pink sand.

Well, it was crazy to me because all the beaches I had seen prior were Ocean City, Outer Banks, and Colonial Beach... none of those are exactly a staple on Travel Channel.

So we get off the boat and pile into a cab, me riding shotgun (On the left hand side, which felt weird) and took off.

Now, Bermuda is a "British overseas territory", so they drive on the opposite side of the road here.  And the people there are all really, really nice, which I dunno if that's the same in England.  But that's not the point here people.  So we're flying down these tight, narrow little roads and the cabbie and I are becoming best friends, chatting about how long he's been driving a cab (Five years), how long he's lived on the island (His whole life), talked sports (He's a Chelsea fan and was terrible at cricket), and he showed me where he lived.  He had a couch on his porch.

Sadly, we got to the beach and I had to leave my cabbie buddy, oh how I hardly knew ye, but we were at the beach so I got over it pretty damn fast.

Horseshoe Beach.

So we make the short walk to the beach, spread some towels and put up some umbrellas and I take off into the water.

Now, usually at the beach, the sand is hot as hell and kinda rough, but at Horseshoe, it's really, really, really fine and kinda pinkish-whitish, and pretty cool.  And the water was so clear.  And not cold.  And it was really awesome, I'm still really giddy talking about it.  So I'm going to stop talking about that part and move on to the next part.

After we got done swimming, Kelly and I decided to go exploring down the beach, which is bracketed by two big groups of rocks (As seen in the picture above).  We headed to the right hand side, where people had been climbing the whole time we had been there and quickly followed suit.  It was a little rough on bare feet, but the trip to the top was worth it.  Some of the pictures are below, I feel like this post is rambling on, but it'll be over soon.

We didn't know how to get down there, but it looked tough.

The view from the left-hand side of the beach.  

The old fort/building.

Okay, so then we piled into a cab to go back to the boat, sadly this cab wasn't driven by my friend, but by an old guy who called me "Doctor", which was fine by me (I cured his cleft pallet).  He had been driving his cab since 1972 and had lived on the island his whole life, leaving once to go see the World cup.


He told us about some of the history of the island and was kind enough to slow down so we could get a good view (Or in my case, pictures) of the world's smallest drawbridge.

Well, that's the bridge.  It's 18" across and is just plywood and metal.   You're probably asking "What the hell goes through there?  Is it just a tourist trap?  No, it's so sailboats can cross under and the mast on the ship can pass through the bridge.  It's awesome.

That wraps up "Section A" of Bermuda, stay tuned for details and pictures of the last days on the island and the trip back to Baltimore.

As they say in Bermuda, "Goodbye."