J is for Jamaica

When you’re looking for exciting, exotic locations to make your next travel destination, Jamaica probably doesn’t come to mind right away. But when money’s tight and you need a place that starts with “J,” Jamaica seems like the perfect choice.

My Jamaica trip involved an all-inclusive resort, Couples San Souci. Let me start by offering a piece of advice: Do your online research before you commit to a week-long stay somewhere.

I started out in a room with a broken air conditioner located directly above the pool where a very loud local band played until 11pm EVERY night.

That lasted one night before, sweating profusely, I demanded a new room. It went downhill from there. I won’t bore you with the details, let’s just say on the third day, looking for a way to release some of the tension that was mounting exponentially, I made a list of all the things that had gone wrong to that point.

It was FOUR PAGES long.

OK, if you’ve read my other blogs, you know I’m a “make the best of it” kind of traveler, so that’s what I did.

I tracked down the off-the-resort excursion desk and made arrangements to go horseback riding in the Caribbean Sea. What a blast!

There’s something exhilarating about feeling the power of a horse swimming beneath you!

I took the free shuttle to the shopping area in town and wandered some quaint little shops and booths packed with trinkets and souvenirs “handmade in Jamaica.”

I popped into a jeweler and found a really pretty necklace and earring set featuring a “Caribbean stone.”

I grabbed a book from the lending library at the resort and spent an afternoon in a hammock reading a delightfully tacky romance novel.

All this is to say, just because it seems like everything is going wrong, doesn’t mean you have to let it ruin your vacation,

even if your traveling companion insists on staying in the room, burying his face in the free wifi like a hermit.

Get out there! Have fun! One of my favorite sayings is, “Happiness is a choice. Choose it.”

The weather was perfect. The flowers around the resort were bright and aromatic.

There were plenty of places to find a warm breeze and relax. 

I won’t be going back to that resort anytime soon, but my excursion into town leaves me wondering what the rest of Jamaica is like, so I may go back. Notably, a few months after this trip, I made a permanent change to my traveling companion and we started planning K is for Krakow .. which takes us to when I first started writing about my “ABC” trips.

They started in 2002 … Greg and I checked off the “M” trip this fall, so I have a couple more blogs to catch everyone up-to-date.

© The World A to Z, LLC 2014