Although we'd planned to go Friday, we kept wavering as the weather looked dark and threatening down south, but after watching the online Doppler radar for a bit, it appeared that most of the rain would have passed through already by the time we got there, so we decided to go for it. We grabbed our backpacks, water, rain jackets, and camera, and walked the roughly two miles to town to the ferry terminal. We were running a little late due to some neighborly socializing outside our building, so we had to make tracks, and it was awfully hot in the bright sunshine on the way, but we made it in time and paid our $55 BZD ($27.50 US) per person for round-trip tickets.
As we pulled into the ferry dock, we noticed the row of brightly colored buildings, a part of "tourist village" for cruise-ship visitors. Love the Caribbean colors! However, this was not a cruise ship day, so tourist village was closed, with just some renovation work going on. The ferry terminal and small restaurants/gift shops there were clean and secure, so I was starting to feel a bit more comfortable.
We knew which streets to stay on downtown once we exited the ferry terminal and crossed the nearby swing bridge, but finding the swing bridge was more difficult than we expected. A city at street level looks just a bit different than satellite view on Google maps! Fortunately a taxi driving by (with a full load already) pointed us towards the bridge, and we were on our way. We had to wait for what seemed to be an entire school's worth of kids coming the other way on the narrow pedestrian walkway over the bridge, but we finally made our way across.
After leaving Hop Sing, we beat a hasty retreat (at my request!) back to the ferry terminal and were offered several cab rides along the way, even just a block away. Once inside, I could let down my guard and relax after our foray into the gritty city, and the Belikin I had from this little snack bar/gift shop went down really nicely and left me feeling nicely tranquilo.
Today Barry installed our new bike parts. And, we are eight for eight. It didn't rain overnight, but we had a brief shower in the afternoon, a perfect record in October so far.