Bite Me, part l

It wouldn't be a vacation to paradise without a Mak meltdown to go with it. We showed up for our flight to Georgetown and hooked up with our friends and their two children who were traveling with us. We arrived in time to find out that the flight had been delayed two hours so I killed time by going up and down the escalator with Makena about thirty times when I wasn't shoving candy in her mouth or replaying the Barney birthday DVD until it ran out of juice. Jack was easy-going and handled the delay by sighing deeply and sucking back vanilla-soy Chai. (He's a West Coast boy.)
But we made it!
The house was in fact a compound. We had a cook named Jolly, a cleaning-lady named Gloria and sunshine... for about six minutes... then the rain came and we were housebound for three of the seven days with a million mosquitoes and some mysterious bugs called "no-see-ems" (which I suspect were fleas.) We were devoured. It was insane. It was torture. EM and Jack both counted over fifty bites on their calves, alone. Makena was raw. We had her sleeping on a mattress on the floor before we realized what was happening. To see us was to think we were suffering from chicken pox. Our bug repellent seemed to attract them. The meals Jolly prepared were the highlight of our days. He brought in his eleven-year old son, CJ so that the kid could play with him and that helped a lot.
A few highlights included feeding lemon sharks at a nearby fishing lodge and restaurant called Peace and Plenty...Another, was a morning of watching a helicopter circle above the property for an hour. We had planned a treasure hunt for the kids (something they could do in the rain) that day and we sent them to the neighboring lagoon to dig up a clue. They arrived there at the same time as the DEA! There were men armed with machine guns everywhere inspecting an abandoned boat. They quickly flashed their badges at us, realized we weren't drug runners and then resumed their search. We peeled out of there as fast as we could. Our own Pirates of the Caribbean vacation!

Jolly offered to take us to watch CJ at Junkanoo practice one evening -- a parade that happens all over the Bahamas, the day after Christmas. People don elaborate costumes and dance intricate choreographies and celebrate their African heritage. They start preparing in the summer for this. CJ and his sister were going to be part of it and were having a rehearsal while we were there that week. The night we were supposed to go, we canceled because of the bugs. It turned out, to our horror, that CJ's friend's brother was murdered at Junkanoo practice that very night! He saw it happen and then showed up the next day to play with the kids, seemingly unaffected. ( We would have been witnesses had we been there!) We decided not to tell the kids about it but it left us all rattled. More pirate action.
The sun finally came out and we took the boat out to go visit some nearby keys. We took too long getting ready to go and our craft got stuck on a sandbar in the middle of nowhere. We had to sit the tide out a couple of hours and wait for the water level to rise so that we could continue on our adventure. It was at once surreal and fantastic. The water was turquoise, the sharks were somewhere else and Jolly caught a conch and we ate it raw -- Jack, of course, was the first in line to try it.
The weather was warm. We were finally beginning to relax. Jolly took us to Leaf Key where they shot the actual Pirates of the Caribbean movie and we were about to spend the afternoon on the beach when I decided that it would be a fun idea to toss a sand ball at my girlfriend -- this, after having pushed her overboard. My aim was a little too perfect and she caught most of it in the face. After about fifteen minutes of trying to rinse the sand out of her eyes and not getting anywhere with it. We rushed her off to get (gulp) medical attention. I hadn't felt like such a schmuck since accidentally spilling guacamole on my friend's mother's (pink) wedding dress. (It was her third wedding, I was eleven and the incident clearly marked me.)

We left the kids on a deserted island with EM, some water, his book and a lawn chair and hightailed it back to Little Exuma so that we could drive her to the clinic. All the while having visions of our boat sinking and no way of letting anyone know about our little lords of the fly terrorising EM and running amok over Leaf Key...

Is - to be continued