Tim Ingersoll
Contributor
So your asking yourself why did I go to the Caribbean for six days rather than a full week? Well its cause Delta oversold the flight and we got BUMPED! Thats why. What airline oversells a Sprink Break Saturday morning flight? I learned that if you can't confirm your seat assignment over the internet then you are flying stanby. Won't make that mistake again. The best they could do was give us a cab ride to Pittsburgh (5 hours) and put us up at the airport Hyatt for an early morning flight to Atlanta then Provo. How's it going so far?
Well the kids thought it was great and we made lemonade from lemons. They got to watch movies and get room service. I asked them their favorite part of the vacation and they both put that night in the top three. Go figure.
We stayed at the Royal West Indies Resort in a one bedroom suite with a pullout couch. Perfect for a family of four. The room are large and pretty warm and welcoming for a Provo resort. The room had a full kitchen and dining area. There was a balcony overlooking the quiet pool, a room safe, washer/dryer, CD Player, DVD player and microwave. Overall a great setup. There is a library of movies and books in the lobby for free. There are two pools (one quiet/one family), a bar, a restaurant and free internet access. The food at the restaurant was decent and fairly reasonably priced. I generally price a mixed drink to get a sense of prices. A frozen drink ran $7.00 and a beer was a little less. Be prepared, prices for food and drink are high. Breakfast for two with juice and coffee will generally run over $60.00 with tip.
I highly reccommend renting a car for at least a day and maybe the week since many of the restaurants aren't really accessible by foot. You can also get to the IGA Supermarket and stock up on breakfast and lunch stuff to try and save money. The rental car costs $60.00 a day or $340.00 a week. You can rent from Avis and pickup at the airport or the concierge can arrange to have one delivered to the resort.
There is a nice beach access at the front of the resort and seemed to be plenty of chairs and umbrellas for baking in the sun. Grace Bay is still one of the most beautiful in the world but having been going for years I will offer the quote of my son who said "everything has gotten bigger and smaller." The beach is now fairly crowded with large resorts and more are on the way although locals said that the housing bubble had burst there as well as in the US.
We ate at the resort (2X), Coco Bistro, Caicos Cafe (2X) and Danny Buoys (1x). All are in the Ports of Call area and within ten minutes drive/thirty minute walk. If you want a romantic experience Coco Bistro is amazing. Caicos Cafe serves wonderful if a bit pricey food. Danny Buoys offers Irish Pub style dining. All were good and highly recommended. Service has improved markedly on the island and is much more Western that it used to be. Remember that it is rude to charge into a conversation with staff. Always begin any conversation with a pleasant "How are you today?" and you will find that it all goes so much better. Keep in mind that everything moves on a clower timetable. Leave the NY impatience in the States.
Okay so the diving. I dove with Fifi at Caicos Adventures. I'm a little biased since I've been diving with him once or twice a year since 1996. He runs a very professional op and has two of the big catamarrans that are the best day diving platforms I've ever had the pleasure of diving on. You can have 15 divers on the boat and never really feel crowded. He runs the boats out of the south dock to French Cay, SW Reef, West Caicos and the boat channel between Provo and West Caicos. The DM's were friendly and very professional. The only other op I've dived with on the island used to be Art Pickering's Provo Turtle Divers. Art sold it since and runs some more excursion based stuff.
I dove three days out of the six I was there. I dove once at French Cay (sites: Rock n Roll and French Cay Gardens) and West Caicos twice (sites: Boat Cove twice, the Driveway and the Gulley). All sites were wall dives. Max depths were 100 feet. The bottom over the abyss was over a mile straight down. Water temp. was 78-80 F. Very litle current or surge. My only complaint was that your dive day can be long. I got picked up by the CA bus at 8:00 AM and usually got back a little after three. That can cause friction if you are with family. I learned to be very up and raring to go for a family activity when I got back even though I was tired.
We had spotted dolphins swimming with the boat on the way out one day and a monstrous tiger shark (est. 12 feet) in the ten foot sand shallows on another. We were grabbing fins and snorkels to jump in when Fifi pulled away (can you blame him?). Two of the coolest sightings on the trip for me and I wasn't even in the water!
Saw lots of big stuff (sharks, eagle rays, turtles) on almost every dive and the DM's were very good at critter hunting and pointing things out (pipe shrimp, cleaner shrimp, arrow crabs, lobsters, green and spotted morays, southern stingrays, flounders, Flamingo Toungues, etc.). My air consumption was really good and I was able to eek a couple dives of over an hour out of an AL80. Personal best for me. The DM's were raving about a whale shark and a manta ray they had seen and photographed the month before and had the pictures to prove it. Proof positive that the more you dive the more you have a chance to see.
Overall a great dive trip that got off to a rough start. I highly recommend Provo as a dive destination and Caicos Adventures as a dive operation. I look forward to returning again next year.
Well the kids thought it was great and we made lemonade from lemons. They got to watch movies and get room service. I asked them their favorite part of the vacation and they both put that night in the top three. Go figure.
We stayed at the Royal West Indies Resort in a one bedroom suite with a pullout couch. Perfect for a family of four. The room are large and pretty warm and welcoming for a Provo resort. The room had a full kitchen and dining area. There was a balcony overlooking the quiet pool, a room safe, washer/dryer, CD Player, DVD player and microwave. Overall a great setup. There is a library of movies and books in the lobby for free. There are two pools (one quiet/one family), a bar, a restaurant and free internet access. The food at the restaurant was decent and fairly reasonably priced. I generally price a mixed drink to get a sense of prices. A frozen drink ran $7.00 and a beer was a little less. Be prepared, prices for food and drink are high. Breakfast for two with juice and coffee will generally run over $60.00 with tip.
I highly reccommend renting a car for at least a day and maybe the week since many of the restaurants aren't really accessible by foot. You can also get to the IGA Supermarket and stock up on breakfast and lunch stuff to try and save money. The rental car costs $60.00 a day or $340.00 a week. You can rent from Avis and pickup at the airport or the concierge can arrange to have one delivered to the resort.
There is a nice beach access at the front of the resort and seemed to be plenty of chairs and umbrellas for baking in the sun. Grace Bay is still one of the most beautiful in the world but having been going for years I will offer the quote of my son who said "everything has gotten bigger and smaller." The beach is now fairly crowded with large resorts and more are on the way although locals said that the housing bubble had burst there as well as in the US.
We ate at the resort (2X), Coco Bistro, Caicos Cafe (2X) and Danny Buoys (1x). All are in the Ports of Call area and within ten minutes drive/thirty minute walk. If you want a romantic experience Coco Bistro is amazing. Caicos Cafe serves wonderful if a bit pricey food. Danny Buoys offers Irish Pub style dining. All were good and highly recommended. Service has improved markedly on the island and is much more Western that it used to be. Remember that it is rude to charge into a conversation with staff. Always begin any conversation with a pleasant "How are you today?" and you will find that it all goes so much better. Keep in mind that everything moves on a clower timetable. Leave the NY impatience in the States.
Okay so the diving. I dove with Fifi at Caicos Adventures. I'm a little biased since I've been diving with him once or twice a year since 1996. He runs a very professional op and has two of the big catamarrans that are the best day diving platforms I've ever had the pleasure of diving on. You can have 15 divers on the boat and never really feel crowded. He runs the boats out of the south dock to French Cay, SW Reef, West Caicos and the boat channel between Provo and West Caicos. The DM's were friendly and very professional. The only other op I've dived with on the island used to be Art Pickering's Provo Turtle Divers. Art sold it since and runs some more excursion based stuff.
I dove three days out of the six I was there. I dove once at French Cay (sites: Rock n Roll and French Cay Gardens) and West Caicos twice (sites: Boat Cove twice, the Driveway and the Gulley). All sites were wall dives. Max depths were 100 feet. The bottom over the abyss was over a mile straight down. Water temp. was 78-80 F. Very litle current or surge. My only complaint was that your dive day can be long. I got picked up by the CA bus at 8:00 AM and usually got back a little after three. That can cause friction if you are with family. I learned to be very up and raring to go for a family activity when I got back even though I was tired.
We had spotted dolphins swimming with the boat on the way out one day and a monstrous tiger shark (est. 12 feet) in the ten foot sand shallows on another. We were grabbing fins and snorkels to jump in when Fifi pulled away (can you blame him?). Two of the coolest sightings on the trip for me and I wasn't even in the water!
Saw lots of big stuff (sharks, eagle rays, turtles) on almost every dive and the DM's were very good at critter hunting and pointing things out (pipe shrimp, cleaner shrimp, arrow crabs, lobsters, green and spotted morays, southern stingrays, flounders, Flamingo Toungues, etc.). My air consumption was really good and I was able to eek a couple dives of over an hour out of an AL80. Personal best for me. The DM's were raving about a whale shark and a manta ray they had seen and photographed the month before and had the pictures to prove it. Proof positive that the more you dive the more you have a chance to see.
Overall a great dive trip that got off to a rough start. I highly recommend Provo as a dive destination and Caicos Adventures as a dive operation. I look forward to returning again next year.
We usually stay at ocean Club East and we love it there.
