Thank you in advance.

We really enjoyed dipping our toes metaphorically into the Caribbean last year and I'm wpondering what else we might like.

We went to Barbados and St. Lucia. We prefered St. Lucia for the lush scenery and low costs, yet still had a fine time driving ourselves all around Barbados and exploring the East Coast without worrying about safety/ getting lost.

I think that we're pretty much happy in a destination that gives us the freedom to explore on our own without undue fear for our safety.

We're low key. No beer. No neon colored drinks. No T-shirt shopping.

We like hotels not rentals.

Liked Puerto Rico, St. John was a little too small/laid back for a long trip. We will hike once, but not every day...

Would we like Grand Cayman? Grenada? St. Croix?

Thanks a lot for bothering!

I previewed and still a typo! Argh!

Aruba? Curacao?

We loved Aruba...We rented a car for the whole week and never had to refill the tank. Very easy driving on this island. Great places to eat and wonderful shopping. We stayed at the Marriott Surf Club, great resort.

grand cayman is flat and scrubby. easy to get around by car. expensive island. wonderful snorkeling/diving. very safe. has very good hotels directly on seven mile beach (the place to be). not as large as barbados or st. l.

hopefully ejcrowe will see this thread as she has been on grenada and could tell you about it. or search under her name - many posts. this island might be a good choice for you.

i don't know much about aruba but think it is not lush, but one of the flatter scrubbier islands and busier than some.

or you could look at anguilla. flat, easy to get around, with loads of gorgeous beaches. very laid back. very nice hotels.
happy planning.

Grenada will offer a similar lushness and scenery to that of St. Lucia, minus the iconic Pitons. I found the ease of driving around the island to be quite good and in fact was perfectly comfortable bebopping around on my own. Grenada also offers a very wide range of accommodations in all budgets, so even though it's expensive to fly there, once you're there it's pretty easy to stick to a lower budget if need be.

I've mostly stayed in villas or small apartments on Grenada. My one hotel stay was at LaLuna, which is on the upper end of Grenada's price scale. For beachfront resorts that offer the usual amenities, consider Coyaba for a small to mid-size, or the Rex or Grenada Grand for larger scale. Coyaba and Grand are on Grand Anse, a great beach location for walking to other restaurants, shops, etc. The Rex is more remote, out by the airport, so you're a taxi drive or rental car away from most places.

If you don't need to be beachfront but want nice surroundings and some self catering facilities, Blue Horizons is a great choice. It's several hundred yards off the beach but you do have beach access and guest privileges at the sister resort of Spice Island Beach Resort, the toniest place on the island.

Jenny's Place is a small B&B on the northern end of Grand Anse that would be suitable for a lower budget. True Blue has less expensive rooms in their resort but again, the location is a bit remote.

In the mostly residential area of Lanse Aux Epines, there's the Calabash Hotel on the upper end of the scale and the Lanse Aux Epines Cottages or Twelve Degrees North on the lower end to midrange.

On Grand Anse in the lower price range, look at Allamanda or Flamboyant hotels.


Grenada is gorgeous and offers hiking, waterfalls, lovely beaches, a great open air spice & produce market, a picturesque downtown setting by the Carenage, a lush & rugged interior, and plenty of good restaurants and beach bars for mingling with both tourists and locals. It's one of my favorite destinations.

How about Bermuda and Antigua.

Cayman is "flat and scrubby" ?

Flat yes, scrubby.. no

Not the most stunning scenery, but as it is very flat, hardly surprising....

However, I think Andrew Guthrie and his team at the Botanic Park would have no idea you were talking about Cayman if you told them the place was "flat and scrubby".

Plenty to explore in the Eastern Districts of Grand Cayman, or if exploring is your thing, maybe a few days in Grand Cayman and one or two in Cayman Brac / Little Cayman.

apologies for the misinformation. i meant it as a relative comparison it to the lushness of islands like st. lucia and misspoke.

tom - i've been planning a trip to gc for some time now. if we were to choose to visit little cayman or cayman brac with the main intention to snorkel which would be preferable? easier to get to, easier to stay on for just one night, easier to access beach snorkeling. we'll be traveling with my best friends mom who is 79 now, and want to make the adventure simple for her.

THANK YOU!

Wow, now my work is cut out for me. I will start exploring and return with detailed questions.

Thanks so much for all of this input!

I will agree with ejcrowe that Grenada has what you are looking for, authentic Caribbean feel, great market, good restaurants, wonderful people.

I found Aruba to be too ...I guess the word is Americanized, for my taste. It is beautiful tho!

I was going to recommend Nevis, but it is even smaller than St. John, so probably not for you, unless you split your time with St, Kitts, which is very doable.

One other thought would be St. Vincent - absolutely gorgeous windward side, very light on the tourism, great hotel I've stayed in is Young Island. We rented a jeep and explored quite a bit.

Here's something I can research on my own, but if you are reading this and willing to add, that would be great, too.

We accidentally combined Barbados and St. Lucia (that is, only decided once we saw how close they were and logical to combine).

Are Grenanda and St. Vincent also a "pair" that makes sense logistically? In coming all the way from the West Coast, it's fun to see more than one island if we can.

I will research further...hopefully we'll eventually see all the islands, so this is so helpful for my "wish list" as well.

Thank you all again!

virginia

No worries

Re snorkelling in LYB or CYB, either is similarly easy to get to, multiple small prop (Twin Otter) flights per day.

I'm an expert on snorkelling on either of those islands though, so can't comment too accurately, but I have snorkelled in various spots on both and I would say that if ease is important to you, you can have lots of fun exploring the many well known and not so well known snorkelling spots along the coastline all the way around the Eastern districts from Bodden Town round East End to North Side and Cayman Kai and Rum Point.

leaving soon, on my first visit to Grenada I had stopped first on Bequia for five nights and spent a full day on St. Vincent. I felt like I experienced three islands for the price of one. I loved them all and would return to Bequia and St. Vincent in a heartbeat. (by the way, Bequia is part of the nation of St. Vincent & the Grenadines, so though I was three islands I was only in two countires.)

You could also visit Carriacou, part of the nation of Grenada, which you can reach by ferry or plane from Grenada.

Because I used frequent flyer miles for my trip, and because Bequia is so difficult to reach from most places in the US, we used Barbados as our gateway airport. We flew on American from Hartford, CT through Miami to Barbados, where we then picked up a regional airline, SVGAir, to get to Bequia. We were there by sunset. Leaving Bequia we ferried to the "mainland" of St. Vincent and spent the day exploring before leaving on the only flight to Grenada late in the day, on the much-maligned LIAT.

TO get to Bequia you could also fly to St. Vincent and ferry over, but flying to St. Vincent from the US is also a little difficult. But these places are oh, so worth it!

That is great information to have! Thank you again.

I love the idea of flying into one and out of another. A ferry connection also sounds good.
I think you have "sold" me...now off the currency conversion tables...

Is there a reason you just spent the day on St. Vincent and not longer, ejcrowe? From what you have posted, I am guessing that the flight you caught didn;t operate daily?

I think we flew LIAT between St. Lucia and Barbados, but now I don't recall. I thought it was BWIA, but maybe that's just adefunct airline. We did carry on specifically because of what others had written about LIAT, I do remember that detail!

I will be back tomorrow. Thank you again and all suggestions most appreciated. Oh, why did we ever leave East Coast where the Caribbean is not such an ordeal?

I don't really have a good reason to give about not staying overnight on St. VIncent...for some reason it just wasn't calling to me when I planned my trip. Bequia and Grenada issued a stronger siren call, so I planned my trip around those two islands: 5 nights on Bequia at the Frangipani and 9 nights on Grenada--6 nights in a villa and 3 nights at La Luna.

Once we stepped foot on St. VIncent we realized that in the future we'd like to spend more time there. We got a nice taste of it since we arrived on a morning ferry and our flight didn't leave until something like 7:00pm. We did the fort, the botanical gardens, a medical museum, and lunch and a tour of Young Island.

At the time I booked our trip, there was only one daily flight from St. Vincent to Grenada, and that was the LIAT evening flight. That may have changed since then.

I'm going to search for my old trip report and top it for you. It's very long, but you might find it helpful as I went into quite a LOT of detail. You might decide that these islands are just the thing for you, or perhaps that you'd prefer someplace else...

I just logged in and saw that trip report first and thought "oh, good!"

Thanks for bumping it up. I'll read it this weekend.

I had a look at the really helpful interactive page for the region and already see some teeny weeny places I might like to go just for the idea of it...

It seems all the islands are reachable by sea, unless I have that wrong. It's kind of hard to resist the idea of seeing all of them since we are so far and they are so close to one another...

I will research this weekend, including reading that trip report. What fun!