hot sauce for the coming cruise Tuesday, February 17 2026
location: Room 3, Edgecombe Resort, St. Mark, Grenada, the Caribbean Sea
I got up well before Gretchen, made myself a tolerable cup of instant Nescafe coffee using the room's electric teapot, and then went on a stroll around the grounds in hopes of seeing birds to photograph. There was a small species of mockingbird and some sort of very small black finch-like bird, and that was pretty much it. I walked down below the resort grounds on a marked path that led past some garden patches and ultimately ended up at what looked like an orchard of small pineapples on low shrubby bushes.
Later I went out on our room's back porch with my laptop and perhaps another cup of Nescafe so I could do my usual routine without disturbing Gretchen. Our section of porch was separated from the porches of other guests by a barrier that didn't conceal much and permitted the passage of small creatures such as a very friendly freerange housecat that I initially thought belonged to the resort but later turned out to belong to one of the other guests.
At around the time Gretchen got up, there was brief rain from a specific cloud in a partly-blue sky. Since the sun was still low in the east at the time, it created a dramatic rainbow over the sea in the west, and we did what we could to photograph it. The rainbow continued as we we made our way first to the poolside to claim a pair of shady chaise lounges. Soon thereafter, we went to breakfast in the semi-outdoor dining area. There weren't many vegan-friendly options on the menu, and there was also no coffee other than Nescafe, which seemed kind of weird given the price we were paying to stay there (which was as if we'd never left the United States). Our waitress was not particularly friendly and had a decidedly fatalist view about what was available, as if nothing could be done about it. Considering the resort had a relationship with the driver who had driven us up from St. George's, why, we wondered, hadn't they had him pick up a couple pounds of real coffee and perhaps other things from a grocery store before picking us up from the airport? The one food item that was vegan was toast with a side of potatoes and maybe some plantains (which were cloyingly sweet, unlike, say, Costa Rican plantains). That was a lot of carbohydrates and not much protein, so Gretchen asked if maybe some beans could be organized. This was a request that was clearly outside the expectations of our waitress, but somehow she eventually found some canned beans, the kind associated with Boston perhaps, but as sweet as candy. It was kind of gross, but we needed amino acids for continued metabolic efficiency and the repair of cellular mechanisms.
Gretchen ended up spending most of the day in a chaise lounge near the upper infinity pool, with me coming by to do the same only occasionally. I dislike sunblock, so when I was near the pool, I was always in the shade. While we were there, we got a mysterious message from Central Hudson about some emergency (and it was hard to tell what emergency it was from context, and we use Central Hudson for several of our properties). So Gretchen tried to call them back (for some reason she was able to make calls despite our being in Grenada) only to find nobody was answering calls because it was a holiday or something (though President's Day had been yesterday). So Gretchen decided not to worry about it.
When we returned to the semi-outdoor area for lunch, we learned that none of the vegan options could be made because the kitchen didn't have the necessary raw materials. But, not to worry, those raw materials (which included such basics as lettuce) would be coming later in the week. "But we're leaving tomorrow!" Gretchen exclaimed, obviously flustered by the poor restaurant management being presented fatalistically. No manager of an American restaurant would allow a waiter to tell a guest that making a salad is an impossibility. Gretchen managed to convince our waitress to tell the cook to improvise something a vegan could eat, and eventually she brought something out for us. It consisted of potatoes and various cooked vegetables in a strew similar to what we'd had last night, though not as good. But the house hot sauce, which I'd asked for last night, was so good that it made anything it touched delicious. It was similar to the hot sauces I'd first encountered in the Yucatan, the kind featuring very hot peppers (such as habañeros) in a slurry of carrots or other similar vegetables, sometimes a little mustard, and little or no vinegar (that is, very unlike the Tabasco-style hot sauce one finds in the United States and much of Mexico). I would later learn that the hot sauce is called "Baron" and is native to the Caribbean.
That hot sauce was so good that I wanted to take some with me for use on the coming sailing ship cruise. So I poured all the gin from one of the four 100 mL platic bottles that I use to smuggle it in my carry-on luggage into a coffee cup so I'd have an empty bottle to squirt hot sauce into. Then I took the empty bottle back to lunch and filled it with hot sauce.
Later, after lunch, I drank all that gin so it would not go to waste. 100 mL is kind of a lot of booze even for me, so I was a little sleepy after that. This semi-drunken state had me spending more time on the chaise lounge by the pool, mostly reading articles from an ancient copy of the TRS-80 Microcomputer News from June, 1984, which I'd salvaged from my childhood home in one of my recent visits. (I love seeing how modest people's expectations were for computers in those days!).
Later Gretchen went for a solo walk around the resort grounds similar to my morning walk, though she went up above it on the hill. She returned with a mango she'd found on the ground that she'd eaten part of, and she offered me the rest. It was amazing, and to think that such amazing fruit can just be found on the ground suggested to me that living on this island would never be a struggle no matter how broke you happened to be. It didn't even bother me that I would have mango fibres caught in my teeth for the rest of the day.
This evening, Gretchen arranged to have a massage in our room. So I decided to make myself scarce by sitting with my laptop in an area beyond the semi-outdoor restaurant that had no roof and provided a good view of the sea. As the sun began to set, I used my good camera to record a zoomed-in video of the spectacle, which included a number of birds flying through.
When Gretchen finally saw off her masseuse, she gushed that she'd just received the best massage of her life.
Dinner tonight wasn't as good as it had been last night, and again the cook pretty much had to improvise something with whatever vegetables were on hand. I also drank a cocktail, which was boozier than expected. As we dined, a small grey bird was flitting around from light to light just beneath the ceiling overhead, obviously confused by the presence of light well after sunset. Anyone with any sense of nature could see it was a bird, but some of the other diners apparently lacked this and expressed concern that the creature might actually be a bat, which would somehow make it more sinister. These were probably the same people who had loudly killed a spider last night. "That's so stupid," I said, and Gretchen agreed. Why do such people end up at ecoresorts? They should go to Disney World instead.
It being a vacation day in the tropics, we went to bed fairly early.
A termite structure on a tree this morning. Click to enlarge.
Google Images claims this is some sort of grassquit. Click to enlarge.
This morning's rainbow over the sea. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen and me with that rainbow between us. Click to enlarge.
A small mockingbird. Click to enlarge.
Another small mockingbird. Click to enlarge.
A female lesser Antillean bullfinch. Click to enlarge.
