Escape to Provo…

After a month on Parrot Cay, I was suffering from more than a little cabin fever…

Patricia sensed my restlessness and suggested that we get off the island for more than just a shopping trip… She managed to cobble together two consecutive days off, and booked us into The Beach House, a boutique hotel on Grace Bay on the main island of Providenciales…

In order to maximise our time away, we took the 6.15 am boat off the island… The Sunrise Cruise as it is known by staff gave me my first view of the rising sun from out at sea…

Although most of the beach had been washed away in the storm surge of the previous few days, the view from our large balcony more than made up for it…

Relaxing in our sitting room… Our accommodation at the Beach House was almost twice as large as our apartment back on Parrot Cay….!!

Our balcony was large enough to include a day bed and a table and four chairs… We spent much of our time there, enjoying the view and sipping wine…

Happy to be off our island and away from the “same old, same old”…!!

We spent our down time walking on the beach of Grace Bay, almost as far as Turtle Cove… Evidence of the recent high tides was everywhere… We passed beach chairs, a windsurfer, wooden pallets and damaged beach umbrellas along the way…

Snorkeling was out of the question, as visibility was almost non-existent… So much of the sea bed had been churned up by the surge, that the water was a milky colour, rather than the crystal clear version that we were so used to…

The tides were still running far higher than most had ever seen on Grace Bay, which cut down on the time we had hoped to spend on the beach… Instead, we spent some time around the large swimming pool, and enjoyed the food that the Beach House has become well known for…

Derek, a South African who had lived on the island for the past two years, was delighted to hear and meet a fellow South African… We discovered that we had more than just our homeland in common, as Derek is also of Portuguese extraction…!!

Poolside at the Beach House, Providencilales…

After a relaxing two days, we made our way back to Parrot Cay… On the evening of our return, I walked down to the main beach to see what the situation was down there, now that the tides were slowly receding…

Lone survivor… Just one single lounger had been rescued from the recent tidal surge… The concrete blocks that used to hold beach umbrellas had been dragged back to where they used to stand, but four of them were still missing…

It would take a few weeks to replace the deck chairs and umbrellas that had been washed away, and I wondered what guests would be using in the meantime… Replacing capital items that are either damaged or been swept away by bad weather, is no easy task when you are on an isolated island in the middle of the Caribbean…!!

Our time away from the island had been too short, but the change of scenery had been good for both of us… This would be the last time we had some “alone-time” together before I began the journey back to South Africa via New Jersey, and much of our time had been spent quietly absorbing the reality of this…

Neither of us were looking forward to that day…