Arriving at A December Destination Wedding

I arrived in Jamaica Thursday afternoon, December 13th, at Couples Swept Away, a resort in Negril located right on the edge of the Caribbean sea. My daughter Juanita will be getting married here on Saturday, December 15th, in the wedding gazebo on the resort property. Negril is about an hour and a half from the Montego Bay airport where I landed after a very long flight from Richmond that began at 6 a.m. to Atlanta by 9 a.m. - then a 2 hour stop over there and a three hour flight from Atlanta to Jamaica, arriving about 2:30 p.m. A bus driver brought us to Negril from Montego Bay after we cleared immigration.

The streets are narrow and the bus drivers drive very fast. On the way here, I sat up front with the bus driver whose thick accent was hard to understand. Children all wearing different colored uniforms were just getting out from school - it was about 3:30 p.m. Each school has a different uniform that the children wear so a child's school can be known just by the uniform he or she is wearing. The parents have to pay for the children's school books and supplies and since some of the families are very poor and cannot afford to pay, the government has a program that provides for them although the country has no welfare system. If you don't have a job, you are just out of luck. I saw some women selling bottled water in the streets--anything to make money.

Tonight the two families and their friends gathered for a reception at Rick's Cafe, a local restaurant near huge cliffs that jut out into the sea. Young men climb the cliffs and dive into the blue Caribbean waters below. The night sky was so clear tonight - I could see the stars. I lay down in a lounge chair beside the pool next to the cafe, gazed at the stars and drank Jamaican rum! Mmmmmmmmm good!