Grenada

     From Jiquilillo we caught a series of buses all the way down to Grenada and instantly fell in love with the place.  The city is an old Colonial settlement so all the buildings are.... well..... Colonial.  Much like Charleston S.C.  On the outside the buildings all have a kind of flat exterior and are all two story.  Once you get inside, they are amazing!  The ceilings are all between twelve and eighteen feet high and most buildings have a second story of some sort.  The buildings are all kind of square with huge rooms around the perimeter and usually have a central "garden" area in the middle that the house surrounds.  When you walk down the street, you can kind of peek into hotels, or peoples houses and get a glimpse of some old architecture and beautiful gardens.

     We stayed in a hostel downtown not far from the city's central park.  It was a decent cheap hostel but turned out to be sort of a party place.  The problem was that the main socializing table was right outside our door and the windows to our room were just screens.  There wasn't any noise buffer at all.  A few nights we didn't get much sleep due to the late night crowd but the last few nights were okay as the drinking crowd had moved on.

     Staying at the hostel included a free weeks membership to a local gym a few blocks away.  The name of the place is PURE.  We ended up going every day we were there as we liked it so much.  I hit the weights and treadmill every day and Nicole did either yoga or a "bootcamp" workout.  I ended up doing the bootcamp workout with Nicole on our last day there and man oh mister!  Man, that was a hard class!  I haven't worked out that hard in a long time.  For cardio, at least!  We also took a chocolate making class at the gym.  We ended up taking raw cacao beans and roasting them, grinding them, and adding raw sugar to make little chocolate balls.  They were a little bitter but still pretty tasty.  Turns out that unprocessed chocolate is actually pretty good for you.  Who knew?  The gym also had a pet turtle on the grounds.  Snoopy was his name.  I thought it was funny for a gym to have a pet turtle.

     While in Grenada, we went on a canopy zip line tour.  I think the pictures speak for themselves.

     Overall, we loved Grenada.  The people.  The food.  The gym.  The town.  The architecture.  I can definitely see myself visiting Grenada again.  It would be easy to head there and just relax for a few weeks to a month.