TRIP DETAILS

Trip length (including travel days) - 9 days

Time of year - April

Countries visited - The Bahamas

Cities/Locations visited and time in each:

Georgetown, Exuma - 7 nights

PATH WE TOOK

Fly Denver to Fort Lauderdale, Florida (stay overnight)

Fly Fort Lauderdale to Georgetown, Exuma (the following morning)

Rental car for checking out the island (we used Thompson’s)

Fly Georgetown thru Fort Lauderdale to Denver (all one day)

HIGHLIGHTS

Renting a boat from Minn’s Water Sports was certainly the activity highlight of the trip. We were able to explore a huge area of water/shoreline/sandbars by ourselves for the whole day. Thankfully we had enough know-how on steering and anchoring the boat, because there was essentially no instructions or training provided!

Lots of pool/beach time with our family (Spencer’s brother & sis-in-law) who traveled with us for the first time.

OUR NOT-SO-FAVORITE THINGS

The running water in our VRBO shut off every night at 10pm and didn’t turn back on until 6am. There were no comments or reviews related to this on VRBO. The owner didn’t give us any advance warning, however when we asked him about it, he said the local water company sometimes decides to work on pipes in a specific region of the island, and doesn’t give anyone notice about when or for how long.

As a result, there were no late night showers, teeth brushing, or toilet flushing without spare buckets/bottles of water!

The rental car had only 3 of the 4 windows working (3 out of 4 ain’t bad, I guess?!), and there was no spare tire (fortunately we didn’t need one, but what if we had?!?!).

The stores and restaurants didn’t seem to follow any stated open/closed times - it seemed like they’d open whenever they felt like it, and close likewise, so we couldn’t trust any of the days/times we might have been able to find posted or online.

We got unlucky and caught a very windy week, so unfortunately that meant no Scuba Diving on the local reefs, no SUP’ing, and a couple of outdoor dinner/drink opportunities got “winded” out. Of course there’s no way to control the weather, but it was a bummer!

WHY WE PICKED THIS LOCATION

We had heard about Exuma from some friends at the gym…they and their teenaged daughters had been and loved it. From prior conversations with them, it seemed like we shared similar interests and likes/dislikes when traveling, so we decided to give it a try!

It’s somewhere we’ve never been before.

We only had 1 week so needed something (relatively) easy to get to - although with the time difference and layover in FL, it wasn’t as easy as we would have liked.

Its natural beauty and availability of water-based activities (SUP, Scuba, Snorkel, Boating, etc.)