OVERALL SUMMARY: Well, we made it back safe and sound from our 4-week trip to the Bahamas and Florida. We had a fantastic time and everything went well. Carl & I were both healthy the whole time (except for mosquito bites), our travel plans went as expected (except for coming back to USA) and it was just great!!!!

I'll give you a short re-cap of the trip and then, after that, I've written down a lot of details of our trip. The details are for us (we have problems keeping all our trips straight), so we have some place to write down names, places, etc. that we might need to refer to later. It's easier to keep all this together, so don't feel bad if you don't read the whole thing. You can read all or part of the journals or skip the journals altogether; it's your choice.

In the Bahamas, because we didn't go on a cruise, we were on our own. We had reservations in and out of Florida and into the Bahamas, but the rest of the trip developed as we went. Carl was loaded with input from the Internet, although we found that many places misrepresented themselves (but the Hope Town Harbour Lodge was just as advertised). The places we stayed were small, out-of-the-way places, not big resorts. They didn't have many amenities. We had no TV in the Bahamas except for the 2 nights in Nassau. We even missed the election coverage.

The first thing we did when we arrived in a new place was to go to the grocery store. We mostly had a mini-fridge and a microwave, no oven or stovetop. The restaurants, in general, were either closed for the season, closed due to hurricane damage, or too far away (with roads full of potholes, we didn't want to be driving around in the dark and the sunsets were about 7:00, then 6:00 with the time change). We usually ate breakfast on our porch and then packed a picnic lunch. We liked cooking ourselves and eating dinner on our porch watching the sunset.

We had trouble with the phones. We bought an MCI calling card at Costco ($.03/min) before we left, but Bahamian phones didn't work for 800 numbers, which, of course we needed to access the MCI card. Eventually I bought a Bahamian calling card. I was able to use it in Nassau and again at the Marsh Harbour Airport. We borrowed the phone a few times, but we got really frustrated trying to use public phones that wouldn't take either MCI or Bahamian calling cards, or any money (either Bahamian or American). The people we met were really friendly and helpful. The hurricane damage was being repaired everywhere we went. There were lots of "blue roofs", road damage, trees blown down, trees with no leaves, docks crooked or gone, sand-blasted houses, etc. There were workers everywhere repairing the damage. Life goes on after hurricanes.

After 3 weeks in the Bahamas, we flew to Ft. Lauderdale (after sitting in the airport watching it rain all day) and drove a rented car to Suzy's in Stewart for 2 days. Then we drove to Ft. Myers Beach for 5 days before we flew home.

We moved around a lot on this trip, as you can tell, but Carl & I did really well, organizationally speaking. We are much more organized than before. We only had a few occasions when panic set in with missing meds or keys. It's extremely important for Carl to take his medications daily. Only once did we lose them, but I had backup and Carl took those until the meds showed up. We left our key to Hope Town Harbour Lodge in the room and locked ourselves out one day, but that was no big deal; the key showed up right away. We kept trying the MCI calling card, but then one time we were going to try it and couldn't find it (although we did have the numbers written down, so we could still have used it if the phones had worked). It showed up, too (it was stuck to another card, right where it was supposed to be). We're going to be traveling a lot, so we want to be organized and right on top of things. We did really good this trip. Hopefully, we'll be even better next time.