We had a good night’s sleep and adjusted fairly well to the time change. Nicole already found out that her Covid test was negative. The email was sent to her around 1am. I would not be so lucky. Because we were expected to both be in quarantine for the day, one of the hotel staff put together a breakfast tray for us.
Once the sun was up, it got fairly warm out on the balcony. In fact, it has been much warmer here than I would have expected, which is a good thing. As the minutes and hours ticked by, I was quickly running out of things to look up on the internet. Nicole was probably getting very tired of me climbing the walls. Hoping to save herself from this misery, she called the Covid hotline a couple times to inquire about my test’s whereabouts. They eventually suggested emailing the group doing the test. Now, none of this should have mattered because your favorite relative on facebook told you, “WATCH THE VIRUS DISAPPEAR AFTER THE ELECTION!!! NO ONE WILL EVER TALK ABOUT IT AGAIN!!!”
While I’m sure there would be many who would be envious of being stuck in a hotel room in Bermuda, I felt like I was losing my mind. I was convinced they had lost my test. After sending an email to the company who performed the test, I received a response within the hour. While I doubt that my email was the catalyst, receiving my test result was the important thing. It was now about 2pm and I was free. We had ordered food delivery from a nearby sandwich place prior to my result coming in. Food in Bermuda is extremely overpriced. While the sandwiches themselves were a relatively tame $15, the tax and delivery fees along with VAT and all that other nonsense made our end bill close to $70. This was not ideal, so our first stop was a grocery store. After buying more overpriced items, we dropped off our bags and went for a walk — hoping to find our way to a beach.
We began having flashbacks to Dubai when we kept seeing signs for “private property” or “beach access for residents only.” We were so close, but so far. We could hear the waves crashing, but couldn’t get to them. Eventually however, we found an unassuming path heading in the direction of the waves, and chanced upon a very secluded beach called Astwood Cove.
Minus a couple locals, there was no one else on the beach. The water was a bright blue, but the waves crashed upon rocks at the shore quite violently.
We perched ourselves on some rocks to just relax and observe the waves while discussing how this is a lot different from Scotland. There wasn’t a lot of humidity, so despite having walked for a number of hours, we really weren’t breaking a sweat.
Instead of doubling back the same way we came (which would have been not very scenic), we decided to cut through a park that I saw on my map. This was not a park in the traditional sense of having wide open spaces or picnic tables and playgrounds, it was basically a very overgrown, densely foliated jungle.
The path to cut through the park was not obvious. An elderly group of three who were in some sort of walker’s group asked where we were trying to go. They told us to just follow them. They didn’t strike us as the kind of people who were plotting to murder us, so we walked with them through the dense foliage to the other side of the park.
We split our ways with the older folk, and Nicole and I then joined the Railway Trail which was also very green and overgrown. When we got back to our hotel, we fixed ourselves a sad looking dinner that consisted of a microwave dinner and soup. We will eventually eat out at some point, but this island isn’t doing us any favors with its prices. Sidewalks are hit and miss here as well, so tomorrow we will attempt to rent a scooter or some other mode of transport to get around the island easier.
passports & pepto bismol 