Winter Vacation

12/24/14-1/13/15

California, Las Vegas, Bahamas

Ying and I began our winter vacation with an overnight trip to San Francisco for Christmas to celebrate our sixth anniversary.  After a couple stops on the west side, I checked into The Fairmont on Nob Hill while Ying did some last minute shopping around Union Square.  Although it rained heavily at times, she was able to visit many stores and come back with armfuls of packages.

 

The lobby of The Fairmont was beautifully decorated with a 40-foot Christmas tree and a 2-story gingerbread house.  The hotel was full and many people who were not staying at the hotel stopped by to take pictures of the decorations.  I had not made dinner reservations for Christmas Eve as we planned to have our main Christmas meal on Christmas Day, but we were able to get into The Tonga Room downstairs in The Fairmont which was offering a paltry buffet for $90 per person.  We enjoyed the Pacific Rim Atmosphere before retiring for the night.

 

Christmas Day morning Ying walked down to Chinatown where it was business as usual.  At 10:30 we met at the Top of the Mark Restaurant in the Mark Hopkins Hotel for brunch.  This is one of my favorite restaurants and although we have been here several times, today the weather is beautiful and we had a 360-degree view of the whole city.  And as usual, the food was superb.  We drove home Thursday afternoon, stopping to do more shopping at a Chinese Market in Richmond.

 

Our family Christmas was planned for December 27 & 28th at my sister’s home in Colfax.  We drove up Saturday morning and spent the afternoon watching my niece and her fiancée prepare a German themed dinner.  At 6PM we had nineteen people including six children for dinner. That night Santa Clause visited and left hundreds of packages for people to open in the morning.  Since I had been so good this year, I put out three stockings which Santa filled to the brim.

 

As often happens in our family all children were awake and ready to open gifts at 5:00AM.  However, we had to wait until 7:00AM when the stragglers woke up or arrived for the festivities.  For the next two hours we opened gifts and thanked Santa for his generosity.  Everyone had a wonderful time.  By noon we had packed our truck and were heading back to Fairfield with my parents.  Paul drove up and met us for dinner at our house and took Mom & Dad back to Fairfield.

 

On Monday, December 29th we flew to Las Vegas.  We had arranged to stay at Caesars Palace for five nights, including New Year’s Eve.  We took in several shows including Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Jennifer Lopez and Cirque’s Love.  Caesar’s had a nice dinner party on New Year’s Eve and a brunch on New Year’s Day, both of which were fabulous.  I spent time in the casinos while Ying shopped.  Ying also went to The Luxor to see the Bodies Exhibit and The Venetian to see the Da Vinci Exhibit, both of which I had already seen.  A highlight of her trip was a helicopter ride out over the Grand Canyon.

 

We left Las Vegas on Friday night and took the redeye to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida arriving at 6:00AM.  We had a six hour layover in the Spirit Airways Terminal which was packed with people and miserably hot and humid.  Our charter flight to San Salvador Island in the Bahamas was late, but we finally boarded and took off at 2:00PM.

 

San Salvador is in the eastern portion of The Bahamas and not too large.  The island is also known as Columbus Isle because supposedly this is the first landfall Christopher Columbus made in the new world.  Our plane landed and we taxied to the main building, but only about one quarter of the 110 passengers could fit inside the building at a time, so the rest of us waited outside to pass through immigration.

Once cleared we boarded school busses and rode about 300 meters to the entrance to Club Med.

 

About 20 Club Med staff met our bus and gave us a warm welcome to the property.  After a brief orientation, we were shown to our bungalows.  Ying and I probably have the best possible location of the whole facility with an unobstructed view of the ocean, arranged through our friend Margot who works for Club Med.  After unpacking, we went to dinner in the restaurant, which offered a superb selection of excellent food.  We turned in early as we had not slept much the previous evening.

 

This Club Med offers a wide variety of sports activities and we were anxious to do everything.  Every morning there was a one hour tennis lesson and usually there was some kind of tennis event in the afternoon.  The facility has 10 clay courts which drained quickly when it rained.

 

Sunday after breakfast and tennis we both went for massages at the new L’Occitane Spa.  The ambiance was nice, but I have had better massages.  Weather was perfect and we spent time at the pool and walked along the white sand beach.  Most of the guests are French or Canadian with only a few Americans.  There are young children as well as many grandparents.  Ying participated in the aqua aerobics classes at the pool and the sunset yoga classes at the boat dock.  She also found time to squeeze in a facial at the spa Monday afternoon.

 

Tuesday we took jet skis out into the Atlantic for about an hour.  Most of the water was calm as we rode out 4-5 miles to an uninhabited island where we fed fruit to iguanas.  We followed our guide over to another small island covered with birds before returning to Club Med.  Driving the jet ski in the open water was more difficult than I thought, but I was able to keep us afloat without capsizing.

 

The terrorist attacks in Paris took place while we were at Club Med, but I was amazed at what little concern the French showed about the attacks.  Ying thought it was because they were on vacation and did not want to think about it, or perhaps they were concerned, but I could not understand what they were saying, but it almost passed as a non-event.

 

Tuesday night at dinner we met a couple from Montreal who told us of a woman named Isabella who used to work for Club Med as a massage therapist, but now operates her own business on the white sand beach, just over the Club Med property line.  So Wednesday after tennis, I walked down the beach and found Isabella to schedule massages for Ying and myself for later in the day.  She did a great job at half the cost.  Wednesday afternoon I participated in a tennis tournament, but it was not much fun as they wanted to include everyone who came and we ended up playing against a number of beginners.

 

We had rescheduled our sailing and snorkeling activities from Wednesday to Thursday to enable us to see Isabella, but Wednesday night it rained heavily and Thursday morning there were 6-foot waves crashing down on the beach.  The sky was blue, but it was too windy to sail or snorkel.  We took the mandatory 45-minute sailing class with the hope that the wind would die down and we could go sailing on Friday, but that did not happen.  We did spend some time swimming in the ocean, but every wave would sweep us off our feet and it became exhausting after a while.

 

Friday it was still windy so we rented bikes and rode out of the club to explore the other side of the island.  We rode past the airport and along the coast passing through three small hamlets which usually contained a dozen homes and at least two churches.  There did not seem to be any regular stores, but several shacks where you could buy prepared food, usually fish, pork or chicken.  We continued 8-10 miles to a park where there was a monument commemorating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing at this place in 1492, erected by the Government of Spain.  After a break, we rode back to Club Med.

 

Friday night was our final dinner and the tennis pros had arranged for the tennis players to sit together.  Ying and I sat with the Hohenstein Family from Alamo, CA whom I had been playing tennis with all week.  After the fashion show, and a delicious dinner, I went to bed, but Ying went with Nicole & Kayla Hohenstein to the night club to experience night life at Club Med.  As it turns out, Kayla will start attending Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT this fall, about a mile from where I used to live.

 

Saturday we packed and left our luggage for collection outside our room.  We had breakfast, hung out at the pool for a few hours and after lunch boarded the yellow school bus for the ½ mile ride to the airport.  Club Med receives three charter flights each week.  A flight from Montreal arrives on Saturday morning with Canadians and then returns a couple hours later with the guests who had come the previous week.  Similarly, a flight from Ft. Lauderdale arrives Saturday afternoon bringing Americans for a one-week stay, then returns to Florida a couple hours later with American guests.  A third plane arrives and departs each Wednesday from Paris bringing French tourists.

 

Our one-hour flight back to Ft. Lauderdale was uneventful.  We had a ninety minute layover before catching our next flight back to the Bahamas, this time to Nassau where we planned to stay at the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island for three nights.  We arrived after dark and were quite tired so we decided not to go out and went to bed early.

 

Sunday I got up early and explored the hotel.  The place is huge with five different towers, and 140 acres of water parks and features.  We ate breakfast at the buffet and then changed to go to the pools.  We rode the one-mile long raging river during which I got a black eye when the rapids slammed me to the bottom, and swam for a while.  In the afternoon, I went to the casino while Ying took a taxi into town for some shopping.

 

Monday Ying returned to town for more shopping while I returned to the casino.  We met for lunch at Olive’s, Todd English’s new, but overpriced restaurant.  In the afternoon we returned to the water park where we conquered the raging river without injury and then took a couple rides on one of the many water slides in the park.  Monday night we went to Nobu for dinner.

 

Tuesday we packed and prepared to leave.  In the last hour I was lucky enough in the casino to cover the Atlantis portion of our trip.  We left Atlantis at 11AM for our 2:30 flight to Charlotte, NC where we connected to our final flight back to San Francisco.  We were picked-up at the airport and had a comfortable ride home.  Ying said she thought this was one of the best vacations we have ever taken.

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