St Lucia Regency Trip Report

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I wanted to fill all of you in on our trip to Sandals Regency. If anyone has any questions, let me know.

We left out of Newark on Monday 8/23, had a layover in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The plane was a little late out of San Juan. An hour at the most. Met some poeple on the plane also heading to Sandals. Some of them actually ended up being our closest friends on the trip. Since the plane was overweight, they decided to take luggage off and leave it at San Juan. I bet 15 poeple were missing luggage at St Lucia. One of our friends didnt get it until Wednesday. So if you go, pack some clothes in your carry on, especially a bathing suit. Luckily we got all our luggage and left for the resort. The airport is the smallest I have ever seen. One room contained the immigrations, customs, baggage claim, and a bathroom. After Immigrations and Customs, we went to the Sandals tour desk. She immediately called us a cab and we were en route to our resort.

We arrived at the resort, and they unloaded our luggage near the front entrance. They asked our name and when they found us on their list, and saw our room class (we had the 2nd best room class), they immediately swept us away to an air conditioned room, gave us a cool wet washcloth, and gave us champange. We had a brief orientation service and were dropped off to our room. We were so tired and it was already dark out so we decided to order room service and hang out in the room. We would explore the resort the next day.

Every morning we would wake up and order room service breakfast and eat on our patio by our private plunge pool. We hung out at our private pool until noon (when we lost our sun) and went to the pool on the bluffs, to the pool bar. The water in the private pools is not cold, contrary to what I read. If the ambient air temperature at night is 75-80, then the pool water cant be colder that this.

[u][b]Rest fo the FOOD:[/b][/u]
The restaurants were good. Arizona's -. . It was buffet style mexican food. We were not impressed. We went to Kimono's twice. It was great and the presentation was awesome! Armando's was ok. We ate lunch there a couple times and dinner once. We have really great Italian food where I live, so I thought this was average food. La Toc was pretty good. I expected small portions like you would receive in a typical gormet french restaurant, boy was i wrong. The portions were good and the food was tasty. The Pitons (caribbean food) was really good. We ate at the Pavillion (buffet) for lunch. It was ok, but I am not big on buffets. The bars were great. we hit most of them. Our favorite was Herbie's piano bar. The piano player can play pretty good, but his singing, well let's just say that after a night of drinkning, he sounds ok. We took the shuttle to the Grande for dinner one night. We went to Tuncanini's (Italian) which was great! and we hit the London Pub which was pretty cool.

The staff was amazing. they were very friendly and accomodating. Everyone says hi when you are walking through the resort. The only thing i didnt like about the resort is that the beach is public! I didnt use it for this reason. There were locals and their children everyday on the beach. Sandals had one roped off area for us, but we didnt use it. There were also people roaming the beach selling pot. We had a green flag every day except the last 2, because the hurricane was causing disturbances in the sea. We did take the Land and Sea excusion. It was ok. I liked seeing the land and learning about the ecology of St lucia, but because it is such a poor country, locals are constantly begging for money and trying to sell you stuff. I actually cancelled my other excusions because of this. I have been to the caribbean before, but never seen anything quite like this. As far as our resort goes, I like the regency the best. The Grande was formerly a Hyatt and still looks like a "hotel", especially the rooms. The Regency had a nice variety of rooms and many that were like villas. There were some "hotel" rooms, but at least we had the option of different room classes. We met about 5 other couple that we hung out with all the time. Most poeple were there from Monday to Monday, we added an extra day and stayed until Tuesday. We felt like we were all alone again on Monday night since all our friends had left. Sandals was like a "Spring Break" for honeymooners. It was great. We met a lot of friends and drank and ate a lot. I cant wait to meet up again with the friends we met. Maybe at another Sandals for a reunion!

I guess thats it for now. If I think of anything else to add, I'll edit my post. If there are any questions, let me know.