Monday, January 11, 2010
  | Since my outbound Condor flight wasn’t scheduled until 8pm I had a long day ahead of me. First thing after breakfast I asked if I could do a late checkout and that turned out to be possible (for a surcharge of US$60). I joined two British gents I’d met the night before at the hotel bar who had been coming to Antigua for years and always stayed at this hotel, they spent most of their days with fishing gear at the jetty leading to the water restaurant and going for big game fish in about 2-3 feet of water. While I watched they landed a couple of small fry but that was sufficient. Basically they were just chilling (until the pool bar opened). I went swimming a couple of times and soaked up what warmth I could get since the reports from Germany were less than thrilling – several CM of snow and temperatures on the wrong side of freezing. I had forgotten to bring a US plug for my notebook so I tried to charge the batteries from the “Electric Razor Only” plug in the bathroom but that only pushed power to the notebook about 10 seconds per minute and after a full day of charging I only had 10% power, which forced me to radically change my initial plans of using the long flight to work on the notebook and update my web pages. Instead I ended up buying a thriller at the airport which I consumed on the flight across the big pond. Just as with the LIAT flight of the day before, Condor was running about 2 hours late. The Sticky Wicket was closed so there was nothing to do at the Antigua airport but go through immigration and wait. They had remodelled the departure area and added a very upscale US-Style store, but had obviously decided that all tourists are penguins and cranked the air conditioning to such a low temperature that all of the passengers heading back to Europe were wearing their full winter gear and the security crew was wearing long-sleeved sweaters and winter jackets! I felt sorry for those who hadn’t taken long pants or long-sleeved shirts along and the poor Caribbean locals who were just island-hopping were in danger of expiring due to hypothermia. The Condor flight back to Germany stopped for an hour at the Punta Carna airport and we left just several hours before the devastating earthquake hit Port au Prince in Haïti (which is at the west end of the same island, Hispaniola)! |   |