Keeping with our apparent strategy to alternate days with some kind of excursion with days spent at the hotel, today we are hangin’ out. Which is doubly nice because we leave tomorrow for the airport and back home.

We did make a brief trip to a food market a few minutes from the hotel to try and get some snacks for the flight, as we’re expecting the airline food to be mediocre at best and the airport selection poor. We just picked up some chips and Cliff bars.

And then we returned the rental car. Hertz is extremely convenient, as they have an office right here at the hotel. They’re also not very reliable – when I went to pick it up last week, the agent showed up 1-1/2 hours after his posted opening time. I rented for three days, and he said I could extend if I needed. The process for extending is; don’t return the car. It turns out the office is closed Sunday (when our three days were up) and Monday. And when I went to the office this morning around 10, it was still closed. So I dropped the key in the lock box. A couple of hours later I received a receipt from Hertz for the five days, exactly as expected.

Longue Baie (Long Bay), where the hotel sits, is apparently a popular destination for day tripper boats to drop anchor and allow their passengers to play. They dive off the boat, swim, snorkel, play with noodles and float on rafts. As the beaches are all public, they’ll swim or be ferried to the shore and lie on the beach. We’ve noticed these boats every day, but today the frequency of arrivals and the total number seems out of control.

We get group tour boats with 5-15 passengers on a three-hour (or five or six) hour tours. At one point this morning I counted six catamarans and a couple of other single-hull boats all anchored at one time. As I’m writing this at 2:30, there are eight boats, including one very large private motor catamaran and a two-masted sail boat that is designed to look like a very old ship.

I suppose some of the hotel guests are annoyed that these people are using “their” bay or “their” beach, but the fact is that both the bay and the beach are open to the public.

As we no longer have a car, lunch and dinner were at the hotel.