{"id":437,"date":"2015-02-03T22:10:10","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T22:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=437"},"modified":"2015-02-04T19:52:28","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T19:52:28","slug":"tuesday-castries-st-lucia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/tuesday-castries-st-lucia\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday – Castries, St Lucia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2015-02-03<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, we arrived in Castries, on the island of St Lucia… and I didn’t have tour duty!!<\/p>\n

For once, I had a whole day to do whatever I wanted… lurrrvly! Over breakfast, I discussed plans for the day with Neil and Louise; the only thing I really wanted to do, above all else, was to have a swim in the sea, so it was agreed that Neil and I would look for a beach, preferably one that we could walk to. Louise, who doesn’t harbour quite the same desire to hit the beach decided that she would rather spend the morning pottering around the town.<\/p>\n

In the terminal, we enquired as to where the nearest beach was, and was instantly pounced upon by half a dozen eager taxi drivers offering to take us there. When we tried to negotiate the price, the best they could come up with was $5 each, which we rejected. I offered $5 for the both of us, but they weren’t having it, so we started walking. As we walked along, other taxi drivers continued to harangue us “Hey buddy – where you wanna go?” “The beach? I’ll do you a great offer”… “It’s not going to be good enough”, we assured them, and resolutely plodded on.<\/p>\n

The walk, which took us around the harbour, and out towards the airport, finally skirting the runway and arriving at Vigie Beach, took is 30 minutes. For about an hour, we swam in the Caribbean Sea, which was absolutely fantastic. When we’d finished, we decided to take a slightly different route back into the town; one that, on the map at least, looked a slightly more direct route. Direct it may have been – it only took us 20 minutes to return to the ship – but it’s not a route we would necessarily recommend. The road was busy, and pedestrians weren’t particularly well-catered for. On more than one occasion, we wondered if we’d made a grave mistake, when a car would brush past us, with nowhere for us to dash out of their way. St Lucians, it seems, don’t believe in pavements.<\/p>\n

The Marco Polo was parked on the opposite side of the harbour to where I’ve always known it to be berthed in the past. Today, our regular spot had been taken by P&O’s Ventura – an absolute monstrosity of a vessel, carrying over 3000 passengers (apparently). On a good side, though; we were berthed right alongside a bar advertising free wi-fi. It get’s better; I could pick up the wi-fi network from inside my cabin (a first, I think). Needless to say, I spend the afternoon making use of the free internet and pottering around the town of Castries, spending the last of my US dollars and enjoying the freedom of the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, we arrived in Castries, on the island of St Lucia… and I didn’t have tour duty!! For once, I had a whole day to do whatever I wanted… lurrrvly! Over breakfast, I discussed plans for the day with Neil and Louise; the only thing I really wanted to do, above all else, was to have a swim in the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}