We had to wake up and be in the hotel restaurant by 7:30 and we were mostly on time. They had a Sesame Street themed breakfast for all of the participants on this trip with all of the decorations set up and a small presentation with a bunch of the characters. They also had clowns making balloon animals and you could pose for pictures with the Sesame Street characters. The breakfast was buffet but with a couple of egg stations. It was reasonably good and definitely more American style than anything else with eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage and the like.
After breakfast we began our tour of the Beaches Ochos Rios location with an employee of the resort who took us around and showed us the various features of the property. Beaches is definitely geared towards families with kids but it is possible for a couple or a group to have a good time without kids there. I believe this is a down season for them and the place is mostly empty so they are doing some renovations. I assume Beaches is less expensive than other Sandals resorts. The place has the theme stuff like the Sesame Street characters but also has all sorts of places for children of different ages as well as nannies and the like to let parents have some time without the children.
After our tour of the Beaches location we were taken on bus to Sandals Ochi property about 15 minutes away and did a tour of those grounds. Meant for people who don't have kids this is the standard all inclusive resort. It has a bunch of restaurants and a beach club as well as a ton of pools. This tour took us around for about 45 minutes or so. We got to see sample rooms as well as other parts of the resort.
From there we were brought to Sandals Plantation location where we first had a buffet lunch that included jerk chicken and jerk pork among other things. I liked it quite a bit though I think the statement it was spicy did not make sense to most of the Latinos there. They have a different idea of spicy and I agree it was not really that spicy. Not sure how it would be away from a resort. After the lunch we had a presentation on selling Sandals resorts to people getting married with destination weddings or for honeymooners.
After the presentation we were given a tour of the Plantation resort which was the high end place. They have the really expensive rooms including multiparty suites. I believe everything there is butler level service and definitely they have access to places in the other resorts as well by shuttle buses. When we were done the tour we were brought back to the room and we had our afternoon free.
We spent the afternoon at the pool. I sat at the pool bar and talked football for a while as Daniela just swam around and stayed in the water also. We also bought a couple knickknack things from some sellers there near the pool.
We got cleaned up and ready for our nice night out dinner. We didn't get a chance to pick Kimonos, the teppanyaki restaurant when we selected our location but were able to switch into it when we got downstairs because of some cancellations. The food was really good but our chef was not really so much on the show just yet so I would have to say the two canceled each other out for how I would rate it. It appeared other tables has much more active and fun chefs. I think the fact a bunch of folks that weren't supposed to go to Kimonos also jumped on and they served them put them short enough of the properly trained chefs that we sort of got stiffed. But they served chicken, steak and mahi-mahi as the grilled stuff along with rice and vegetables. I had a couple beers.
After we ate we moved on to finding a place to hang out. The group went to a disco which was loud and Daniela and I found a piano bar. We did make it back to the bus in time and were taken back to the hotel where we again tried a disco and found he did not have enough alcohol for some reason and changed over to another piano bar where a lot of folks stayed until fairly early in the morning. It was a fun time but we had to get up for the next day's events soon.
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