West End, Grand Bahama
Today we decided to take a day off from traveling and enjoy the amenities of Old Bahama Marina. This really is a nice place and if you don’t have a boat, but are looking for a quaint, out of the way resort, I’d highly recommend Old Bay. They have a couple of restaurants and what appear to be really nice rooms/condos that overlook the ocean and a beautiful white sand beach.
After a leisurely breakfast, we borrowed a couple of cruiser bikes from the office and headed in to the town of West End. Our primary goal was to look for groceries, but we also wanted to stretch our legs a bit. As we were leaving the marina grounds, we caught up with a young couple that was doing the same thing. We had a nice ride with Keel and Jennie from Portland who were ending their 3 week trip in the Abacos aboard Keel’s mom’s boat. We rode through West End and beyond, passing up the two “convenience” stores as we were enjoying the ride and the conversation.
At about 5 miles, Michelle and I decided to head back to the grocery stores. At the first stop, the shelves were bare. I don’t mean there were a few items missing, I mean the shelves were BARE, as in, they only had bread and one or two other items in the entire store and the rest of the shelves were totally empty! We bought bread, thinking that’s all we could get, but Michelle decided to walk in to the next store which was tiny in comparison. That store was jam packed with goods. We went to the larger store first thinking they’d have more products, but you can’t judge a store by its size or by the quality of the sign out front!
Back on the boat, our young Oregon friends stopped by for a visit and later we headed over to the beach to let Tug burn off some energy. We ended the day with a wonderful dinner at the Marina restaurant.
For those of you that are from San Antonio, you’ll get a kick out of this: A really nice trawler came in to the marina this afternoon and we noticed that the hailing port was San Antonio, so of course we had to go say hello. It turned out that the owner of the boat was former SA mayor, Phil Hardberger. We had a nice chat with he and a guest he had aboard the boat. As we were leaving, I heard the guest say to Phil, “I guess you can never really let your guard down, Phil, even in the Bahamas!” I turned around and responded, “Not to worry Phil, what happens in the Bahamas STAYS in the Bahamas!!”
Tomorrow we head to Great Sale Cay which is about 42 miles from here. From there, we’re really not sure what we’ll do, but we’re starting to feel the pressure of time, even though we have about 25 days before we have to be in Key West.
