Bahama mama

This morning I was leaving the gym (notice how I say that all casual, like this wasn't the first day in months and months that I've been to the gym) and there was freezing rain and snow falling, and the ground was already slippery. I got in my car and "Kokomo" was playing on the radio. Uggghh. I'm usually not someone who hates the cold and complains about winter. I like winter, I like the snow, I don't even mind when it gets dark early (I know, I'm in the minority there). But this weather just kind of sucks. And then I took a shower and I have this scrub from Bath and Body Words called Fine and Sandy that smells exactly like beach. And then I read Melissa's journal about her maybe wanting to go to Aruba this year and I thought, why did she marry Joe instead of me?

I couldn't help but think about where I was exactly seven months ago, in Freeport on Grand Bahama Island. Jen and I went right after I finished grad school and stayed at the Westin at Our Lucaya Beach and Golf Resort, which was just perfect. Balcony off of our room, the Westin's self-proclaimed "heavenly bed" and "heavenly bath," which is what we constantly referred to them as, of course (it's so much more poetic when you can say, "hurry up, I need to take a heavenly shower too!"). Sugar Beach was right next to the hotel and the Carribean was like a big, warm, turquoise bath. We would laugh at ourselves because when we said we were going swimming, it was more like prolonged periods of floating punctuated by taking pictures of ourselves underwater with a disposable camera. We had facials and mud baths and massages; mine was a "Swedish Scents" massage, I suppose to get in touch with my ancestry, and Jen's involved lots of aloe vera, chamomile, and honey because she was pretty burned by that point. We got to swim with a fiesty dolphin who was so thoroughly trained it was like he was a person, which is kind of sad, but we're the dumb tourists who encourage such things. Every night we went to the marketplace across the street where there were lots of restaurants and bars and dancing and slightly odd nightly performances, always involving a man in purple satin pants doing backflips to "Who Let the Dogs Out," all of which provided endless hours of amusement and flavors of rum that we didn't know existed. There were a ton of honeymooners, and they shamelessly tried to market everything as a couple experience ("enjoy a romantic breakfast with passion fruit, starry-eyed syrup, and heart-shaped pats of butter!"), so of course we benefited from that, without having to cuddle afterwards. Actually, ha, at one point we were thinking about having "the massage of togetherness" because it said it was for two people, only to find out that that was a MUCH better idea for an actual couple. The locals tried to impress us with their use of Americanisms, like "I'll be back" in a Bahamian-influenced Arnold accent, so that was kind of like 1991 on Crazy Planet. All in all, it was just a blast, warm and fun and lazy.

So that's what I'm thinking about today, while it's still raining ice out there. Blech.