Our life in Barbados started with a bang – visitors, touring around, and eating well. And of course, going to work, but I will leave that out for this post.

Our first visitor was my old buddy Darren. Technically, I suppose, he was second because Ralph the Rooster and his hen harem were here first.

Darren’s arrival in mid-January spurred an intense period of touring.

Barbados was once full of windmills, many built by the Dutch who were not far away in Surinam / Guyana building windmills for sugarcane. There are still a couple around and one that is almost functional.

The sugarcane was fed into these crushers to press out the juice to be boiled down into sugar. Slaves often caught their hands in these. Apparently, a machete was kept close by to chop off the arm before the whole body got pulled in. Remember, there was no brake!

We visited several gardens, including Huntes’s Garden with Darren.

Also while Darren was here, we started to perfect the afternoon at the beach sundowner routine.

We continued to work on this routine with our next set of visitors – Janet and Mike.

Janet and Mike had their own rental car and toured around on their own. We did however, get to …

In between visitors, we squeezed in a bit of gardening and continued to work on the sundowner routine.

With our next set of visitors, Sandy and Charles, we ventured out to do some more touring around.

With our next set of visitors – Jim and Cathy, we did a bit of deep sea fishing.

We took that little fish home, got some bigger fish from the local market and had a lovely fish BBQ.

One day after our visitors were all gone, we went to Holetown to have breakfast, and were treated to a display of courage and skill. This coconut collector just scrambled up the tree in no time and started to harvest the coconuts.

Apparently, the coconuts are free for the taking. All you have to do is climb up.

This year was our 23rd wedding anniversary. So, we celebrated with sundowners. We are getting pretty good at the sundowner routine.