Doggone it, I have searched high and low for the cable that hooks the camera to the computer and I can’t find it anywhere. So instead of posting pictures of our trip I guess I’ll just have to use a thousand words.

Here are the highlights:

1. Weird fruits and vegetables

No point in traveling if you don’t sample the local cuisine. I ate

• cho-cho (mild steamed vegetable reminiscent of broccoli stalks)
• callaloo (kind of like kale, sauteed, deeeeelish)
• some gray stuff
• two kinds of yams
• assorted fruits, all mild and slurpy, with large seeds

I didn’t eat

• salt cod
• goat

Oh, and how could I forget? “Jiggy” coffee after dinner. Coffee liberally, and I mean liberally, laced with rum, cinnamon, and who knows what other stuff. Mmmmmm…

2. A scolding from the towel guy

So, it’s our first day there, and the kids are mad to get in the water while I’m worried that we won’t find a spot in the shade and still learning my way around this gigantic resort. I end up, rather breathless, at the towel shack, where I am all set to exchange a bunch of plastic cards for a bunch of beach towels.

“Slow down,” the towel guy says. “Slow down! Relax! This is Jamaica! What’s your hurry?” He smiles but he is quite serious. And he is absolutely right. I take a deep breath. I force myself to slow down. And I explain to him that I come from the land of ice and snow. Where I live, warm weather doesn’t last. You have to hurry up and make use of it while you’ve got it. You know that joke about if you don’t like the weather, stick around because it’ll change in ten minutes? — that joke was made in Michigan. Definitely not in Jamaica.

3. Teasing my mom

Did I mention this was a family vacation? My parents, my sister and her family, and the five of us. Well, here’s a funny thing about my mom, and oh I wish I had a video of this. My mom can’t swim. I mean, she really can’t. She has very dense bones & muscles and her body simply does not float. And it’s fun to watch her try. Heh heh.

4. High-jinks

Family vacation, and you know what that means: much goofiness. Picture this: half a dozen of us standing in a circle just outside the super-fancy even-had-a-dress-code restaurant. We’re standing in a circle in order to play a game that my sister has just that moment taught us. Here’s how it goes. I say to the person on my right, “Hey Christopher, what are you doing?” He replies something like, “I’m washing the dishes.” Upon which the person to his right must immediately begin a pantomime of washing dishes. Then it’s Christopher’s turn to say to the dish washer, “Hey Joey, what are you doing?” And Joey, while still washing invisible dishes, must say that he’s doing something else. “I’m tap dancing,” for example. Now the person to his right must start tap dancing, and at this point Joey can stop washing dishes and say to the tap dancer, “Hey Grandpa, what are you doing?” This is a lot harder than it sounds, because you have to be doing one thing and saying another, all while laughing your head off at the sight of your 75-year-old dad tap dancing in front of the entrance to a super-fancy restaurant. Oh yeah, and you’re supposed to go as fast as you possibly can. My sister is in a theater troupe and this is one of their warm-up exercises. Oh ha ha!

5. A geography lesson

Joey spent a lot of time working on a new D&D campaign. For him, this means creating an entire country from scratch, including a very detailed map of the imaginary terrain. He was working on this map during the bus ride back to the airport. It was a fairly long ride, with stops along the way to pick up people from other resorts along the way.

While we ride, Joey is hard at work on his map. At one point he looks up and asks me what is an archipelago. Well, thanks to Arthur Ransome and Ursula K. LeGuin, I actually do know what an archipelago is. Then he asks me what is a sound. Oooh. That’s a tough one. My first thought is Nantucket Sound, which comes up in Nightbirds on Nantucket. Deep water, I think. Whales. But I have no idea what the definition of a sound is. I ask the rest of the family. No one knows. Then Joey wants to know the definition of a gulf. Another toughie. How is a gulf different from a bay? Or is it more like a strait, connecting two bodies of water, but not as narrow? Hmmm. No one knows for sure. We continue to discuss, but it’s frustrating because we have no way to look up the answers.

And then guess what happens?

We stop at the next resort and Joey’s 6th grade geography teacher gets on the bus.

6. An opportunity missed

If we’d been a little more organized I could have incorporated a major literary pilgrimage into our vacation. Sigh.

The trip wasn’t a total loss from a literary point of view, though. Far from it. I read two books during the week, both of which I adored. I foolishly lent both of them to friends so now I can’t blog about them until I get a chance to pick up copies to the library.