I do a lot of traveling for work.  My company covers all of North America, so the United States and Canada.  Most of the time that means I’m busy going to places like Greenfield, IN or Stillwater, OK.  Occasionally I get to visit much nicer places, like San Francisco, or Florida.  However, I’m generally pretty busy when I visit these places, so my trip consists of seeing the airport, the inside of taxi cabs, the inside of the lab, and the hotel, not much of a vacation.  Also, Elane is normally working when I go on trips, so I’m alone as well.

This past spring break we got extremely lucky!  My company managed to sell a system to a hospital in Kingston, Jamaica and I had to plan a trip down (sometimes all that traveling does pay off!).  That would be exciting enough, but turns out that Elane was on spring break from school that week as well, so she could come with me, awesome!  We stretched the trip out a little bit and had three full days on the island.  I worked for a good part of the first two days, but we had a full day and a couple of evenings together.

We had to stay in Kingston because of the proximity to the place I was working, so we mainly did a lot of relaxing at the hotel.  The city of Kingston is the largest on the island and also the capital, which means that it resembles most other cities (minus the view of the beach on one side and mountains on the other).  We stayed in the district known as New Kingston, right near Emancipation Park, and felt pretty safe walking around the hotel and park area.  We probably wouldn’t have wanted to wonder much further than a few blocks from the park though.  If you are planning a trip to Jamaica I would suggest going to the north coast (Kingston is on the southern side) because that is where most of the tourist attractions are.  You can get there from Kingston, but it’s a few hours by car and transportation can get quite expensive.

There are a few things to do in and around the city and the day that we had free we checked out a little local spot called Lime Cay.  Picture a desert island in your head and you have the exact image of Lime Cay.  It is situated about 10 minutes by banana boat off of the coast of Kingston and is literally a small uninhabited, white sand beach, desert island.  It takes

about 10 minutes to walk around the entire island, with one side facing the city if Kingston and the other side facing nothing but gorgeous blue waters.  The boat dropped us off and we stayed there for around 4 hours, about 3 of which we were completely alone on the island (another couple got dropped off later in the day).  It was a pretty surreal experience, but as cliche as it sounds, there’s nobody I would rather be stranded on a desert island with than my beautiful wife!