Day 5 – Celebrity Summit - Wednesday 27 November – St George's, Grenada

We dragged the kids out of bed this morning and after getting our things packed up for our excursion and putting 2 bags of laundry out for cleaning (free with our Captain's Club coupons – up to 30 items per bag), we went up to the cafe for breakfast and met up with Wade and Charlie.

We were a teeny bit late getting out to the duty free store because Amina couldn't find her driver's license. When we did get there, our tour guide, Selwyn, was there to meet us for our private tour of Grenada. We boarded a pretty big van and off we went for our 6 hour tour.

The day was pretty warm and it seems like there's no functional A/C in any car in the Caribbean – it's a good thing that the breeze coming in through the windows are pretty cool. We drove for what seemed like a really long while on some of the craziest, most twisted and narrow streets we've ever been on. To drive in Grenada means understanding the intricacies of curves, frequent braking, too-numerous-to-count speed bumps, navigating around parked cars and pedestrians, and using a series of brief car honks and flashing headlights to tell other cars what you're doing. Now, not only did Selwyn do this, but he was able to do it whilst telling us all about the history of the country (he seemed to have a real knack for remembering dates) as well as pointing out the incredible number of fruit trees, spices, and edible plants on the island. Selwyn told us that there was so much fruit on the island that most of it actually spoils because they cannot be collected in time. Every other tree on the island seemed to have something edible growing on it.

We drove up to Concord Falls and looked around (cost of entry was $1 per person), bought some spices (cocoa balls, assorted powdered spices, and whole nutmeg, bay leaves, and cinnamon sticks) and pure vanilla ($5 for about 6 ounces), and Selwyn showed us what a nutmeg and cocoa pod looked like on the inside.

Nutmeg

Cocoa

 We then went to a nutmeg processing plant and were taken on a brief tour showing us how almost the entire process of harvesting nutmeg and mace was done by hand – the only process not done by hand was the cracking of the nutmeg but all of the drying, sorting, packing, etc were done by hand right down to the manual painting of the nutmeg sacks.

 

Leaper's Hill was our next stop – at the top of a hill overlooking the ocean where the Caribs were defeated by the French and decided to jump off this cliff rather than be captured.

We then drove to the River Antoine Estate to tour the rum distillery ($3 per person exit fee). Unfortunately, we were there right around noon on their lunch break and the huge water wheel (the oldest functional water wheel in the western hemisphere) wasn't on. A distillery tour guide walked us through the process of sugar cane being hand cut and then fed into the press operated by the water wheel. The sugar cane juice then flowed into the boiling house where it was hand ladled from vat to vat getting hotter at each stop. I picked up the ladle to feel how heavy it was – I could barely lift it. The juice was then brought into a storage area of concrete vats for fermentation. Nothing was added to the juice – it was just time and yeast in the air that fermented the juice. The juice was then distilled and filtered twice and the product was between 75-88 proof – illegal to take off the island per our tour guide. As with the nutmeg plant, the amount of manual labor was unbelievable.

After our tour, we were invited to taste as much rum as we wanted. We tried the 20 proof rum punch first and already got smacked in the face with the potency of the rum. The 60 and 80 proof rum almost set my hair on fire. I think one bottle would probably last us 20 years. It was comical that they let us have as much rum as we wanted – we barely took a sip and were just about knocked over. I'm sure a single sample bottle lasted a week or longer for them. I couldn't imagine how it is that pirates were able to drink so much of the stuff.

Selwyn then took us to the Belmont Estates for lunch where we sat in the open dining room and enjoyed the breeze. We got to try sour sop juice (not sour at all – it was milky in color and sweet – nothing citrus or tart at all), nutmeg milkshakes (the nutmeg flavor was almost overpowering), virgin pina coladas, and chocolate milkshakes (with chocolate from their own cocoa trees). Lunch consisted of soup (split pea or green banana – they were out of calaloo soup) followed by an “assisted” buffet, and dessert for about $20 per person.

I had the green banana soup which really didn't taste like banana at all. Green banana seems to be treated more like a potato than a banana – it really just gave the soup consistency like pureed potato and the only flavor was really the spices they added. The buffet included salad with dressings including a nutmeg dressing, green banana salad (more like potato salad), and a golden apple and cucumber salad but I swear those weren't golden apples – they tasted like pineapples. We also sampled some mixed vegetables (sweet potato, green bananas, etc), carrot ginger rice, chicken in coconut curry, grilled fish (didn't like the fish), stewed beef, and garlic beans. The lunch was really pretty good. My favorite was the stewed beef.

Our last stop after lunch and browsing the shops at the Belmont Estates was the Grand Etang national park where we went up to the information center to see Crater Lake ($2 per person entry fee). The information center at the top of the hill had been rebuilt (as much of the island had) after Hurricane Ivan.

Selwyn then dropped us off at the dock and we thanked him for a very informative day (and praised his driving skills). We picked up a few things in the shops at the dock and re-boarded the ship.

I was able to get on the internet for a little bit while we were still docked using our Captain's Club free 90 minutes – the signal really wasn't too bad. We met Charlie and Wade at Cellar Masters for the Chef's Table dinner that we had bought upon embarkation. We had a little champagne and toasted with the ship's maintenance officer, Nick, as well as the executive chef. We were then led into the Cosmopolitan restaurant into the galley and down the escalators to deck 3 where we were, literally, seated at a table right in the middle of the galley.

 The dinner was a lot of fun and the food was good – it was just so noisy in the galley and they assigned us seats where I was seated in between both kids. Wade and Charlie were across the table from us. They poured a sauvignon blanc and a toscana pretty freely and supplied the kids with as much soda as they wanted.

We started with a flambeed prosciutto wrapped shrimp that the Executive Chef, Abdul from India, cooked for us and even served to us. The appetizer was a salmon and crab dish which was delicious. For a short time, I had Rhys convinced that the orange/red fish roe were actually fish eye balls. I had the arugula salad with goat cheese and balsamic vinegar dressing which was pretty good. My entree was a Loup de Mer (sea bass) on an eggplant and tomato ragout. The sea bass was different than the other sea bass that I have had in the past – it was pretty thin. For dessert, one of the Chefs de Range flambeed some strawberries for us and I had a crepe filled with ice cream and served with flambeed strawberries – that was one of my favorite desserts of the cruise.

Arugula Salad with goat cheese

Loup de Mer (Sea Bass)

They took a group photo of us in the galley which we received a copy of the next morning. At the end of the meal, each couple received a copy of the Celebrity cookbook – signed by the Executive Chef and Chef de Range – and each lady received a red rose. The dinner was nice and I learned a lot about how things work in a galley – our Chef de Range, Nenad – answered all of my questions about the different uniforms and grades of chefs.

It was about 10:30 pm when we finished, said our goodbyes and headed off to bed.