Bermuda. Beautiful Bermuda. So here is the deal with Bermuda.
I flew to Bermuda from New York on Wednesday of last week for work. My flight was delayed over 2 hours, but most of that time I was on the plane, in first class, so no big deal. I got in at 10 at night and met up with about 12 people for dinner who were part of this work thing on Thursday. I worked the following day and Friday morning and then Patti flew in on Friday to meet up with me. Patti's mother came up from NY on Thursday to watch all three kids for the weekend and we flew back together on Sunday early afternoon. Or at least that is the plan as I write this in at BDA with very bad weather hitting the east coast. So I was there Wed - Sun and Patti was there Fri - Sun. You know, funny thing about traveling. When I am by myself, traveling is real easy. When I am with Patti, it's great because I have someone to keep me company. When we travel with the kids, it's the biggest pain the a** you can't image unless you have done it. Especially when two are in diapers, all three require some kind of car seat to bring and none are able to carry much themselves. I become a pack mule for three little people who only do what I say a fraction of the time. It makes me appreciate the times when its just the two of us. Anyway, on to the Bermuda story.
Couple of interesting items about the trip...
Couple of interesting items about the trip.
- For work, I stayed in the capital of Hamilton, at the Rosedon guest house. It was great and perfect for being there on work. Not sure if I would stay there on vacation, mostly because it is in Hamilton, but it worked out well since all of our business was in town.
- My work event on Thursday was at the Hamilton Princess, a Fairmont resort. Beautiful but not for me. Too close to the city, at least for a vacation. And no beach, just a pool near a commerce seaway.
- On Friday, I finished up work at noon and took a cab from Hamilton to the Fairmont Southampton, probably the nicest resort on Bermuda. It sits in the middle of the island so you can walk for about 10 minutes in either direction and get to the water, or take a free shuttle and be there in 3 minutes. GREAT resort. Patti and I never go away like this so we splurged and stayed fancy. Also, it was only for two nights so it would not cost us our retirement money.
- On Wednesday Patti started getting her stuff together and got out her passport. It was then, in shock, she realized it was still in her maiden name. She got it for our honeymoon 8 years ago and it doesn’t expire for another 2 years so she never thought about renewing it. Plus her international travel is fairly limited since the kids came along. So we were in a bit of a pickle. The passport rules changed in January of this year and are much stricter. She called Delta and they said she was SOL. Her despair started to grow and I had visions of me sitting on the beach in Bermuda by myself all weekend. Since Bermuda is a British island under the rules and general control of the UK, she called the British Consulate in New York, there’s not one in Boston. They told her to call the Bermuda Board of Tourism. So she called the BBOT and spoke to Tyrone. He made the situation all better by telling her she needed her passport and her marriage certificate. All is well, right? Nope. She looked and looked and could not find our marriage certificate. So problem once again, and stress. We filed for a marriage license in Riverhead, NY because we got married in the state of NY. She called and said that if she faxed a notarized request for the certificate, they would give a copy to her mother who lives within an hour of the place and could pick it up before coming to Boston to watch the kids. So she went to our accountant who notarized and faxed it, Patti’s mother picked it up and away we went.
- I got to the resort on Friday by 1 and hung out in the concierge level working until Patti got there around 3. We had a great room on the top floor with an amazing view. We started our weekend by having a late lunch, heading to the beach and going for a swim in the hotel pool.
- I’ll spare you the details of the rest of the weekend but it included a long run on something called the Rail Trail, a lot of good food, a few tropical drinks and plenty of sun. When I got to Bermuda on Wednesday, it was cold and stormy. It poured all day on Thursday and was damp and cool. Finally on Friday morning it started to clear and from Friday midday until the moment we flew home, it was perfect 72 degree cloudless sky weekend. You can tell we were in the sun all weekend by our bright red complexion, a product of a long New England winter.
Couple of interesting points about Bermuda.
- There are 66,000 residents on 22 square miles. Less people than the town of Quincy, Mass. To become a resident is do-able, but almost impossible to become a citizen unless you are born on the island from Bermudian parents. Its all around population control since the island is so small.
- There are over 16,000 companies who call their headquarters there. There are great tax advantages to being domiciled in Bermuda and huge financial companies take advantage of it. I was there on Thur and Fri because of our work with some of these companies. The problem is that they often bring in expats – an expat is short for expatriate, a term used to describe someone living and working in a country that they are not from - to work there who, unless they are given special permission, only have 3-6 years to work before they have to leave. Again, control by the government to make sure the local work force is employed.
- If you are an expat, and want to buy a home, you can only buy a home in the top 5% of the price range, and then you have to pay a 22% fee on top of the purchase price to get it. The average home price for non-Bermudians is something like 2 million, plus the 22% fee, so expats pretty much rent. The locals can buy anything but over the last few years the price of homes has skyrocketed so a lot of the younger workers buy condos. Similar to many regions in the US like NY and Boston.
- Since the island is so small, the local government controls the automobile population. A home or resident can only have one car. One. So if you are married and both spouses work, and you maybe have 2 or 3 kids, you can only have one car. The only exception is that doctors can have more than one and certain government employees who use the car for government work. So this creates a HUGE scooter market. Basically all the men who work, from resort low wage bus boys to high paid executives at the aforementioned companies, ride scooters. The wives and mothers use the cars. There are parking lots everywhere for the scooters. In a meeting or conference, locals walk in with rain gear and helmets. I would say that 1 out of 20 cycles is a full sized motorcycle, but mostly they are the smaller CC scooters that have never really taken off in the large cities in the US. Also, visitors cannot drive cars owned by residents. Companies are not allowed to own cars in the company name. There are no chauffeured limousines, and Bermuda hotels are not allowed to have limos to get and deliver guests from the airport. You are not allowed to take luggage on public buses. Crazy. And the roads, well, lets just say that the largest highway is one lane in either direction. And not a lot of sidewalks.
- Cars are inspected every year on your birthday. To keep up the aesthetics of the island, the government has very strict rules when it comes to inspections. There can be no dents, only three colors per car, and rust spots can be no larger than a quarter, with no more than 2 on any one panel and no more than 3 on the entire car. Oh, and the theft rate for cycles is 70%.
- At dinner one night, someone remarked at how clean the island seemed. A local expat who has been there for 27 years, said that besides the people being neat, it was the combination of three things. First, that the cars have to look good. Second, that people take care of their yards as a result of some other regulations. And third, because building code requires roofs of houses and buildings to be white. More on that in a sec.
- There is a distinct style to every single house and dwelling. Other than the big resorts or guest houses, which look beautiful, I am not a big fan. It is because building code requires all houses and dwellings to be built of cinder block. It is code to reduce the damage done in hurricanes. So with cinder block, the architectural style of houses is limited. They are built to withstand strong winds and look it. The other thing is the roof. Again, building code, requires them to be built with limestone slabs and then covered in mortar, then a small layer of cement, then painted. They must be white. No other color. White. And they look like stucco, which all the houses use with the cinder block. The roofs actually look kind of cool. In addition, since Bermuda has no natural fresh water source, each house must collect its own rainwater in cisterns in the basement. The roofs have a ledge on them, instead of gutters, to collect the water and funnel them down pipes into the cisterns. They are then used for tap water.
- The island is very very expensive. Shockingly expensive. Gas is 7 dollars a gallon. Food is expensive. Hotels are expensive. Drinks are expensive. When we decided to go, we knew it was going to be expensive but between my time there with work and then our little holiday, it was more than I thought. Dinner at a moderate priced restaurant that would cost 15 dollars a dish in the US is around 27 a dish there. Lunch of salad, a beer or drink and maybe soup would cost around 30 bucks in the US, maybe a little more, that costs around 60 or 70 there. I am sure there are restaurants and bars where the locals go for food and dinner and stuff, but even the locals that I work with said things are expensive. A little bit of a culture shock. Friday night we spent more for dinner than we have ever spent before in our lives. And we’ve had some pretty nicer dinners before.
- Getting around is not easy. You can’t rent a car so you have to take cabs, the bus or walk. Walking is a death wish since the roads are really really narrow with not a lot of sidewalks. The good thing is that local drivers are used to people, locals and tourists, walking, jogging and riding bikes along the road so they are accommodating. We did some walking and felt like our lives were in risk, but we are used to the sleepy roads of suburbia.
- The people there are great. Very friendly, locals and expats, businessmen and resort workers, and made us and everyone else feel welcome.
- Jesse James, the West Coast Chopper bike maker who is married to Sandra Bullock, arrived on Saturday and stayed on our floor. He was on the other side though, with the suites. Never saw him but saw some of his posse. Also, the Bermuda Open, a tennis tournament, was starting on the Monday after we left and a bunch of players started to arrive over the weekend. A parade of young, privileged, good looking athletic men. And the morning we left, Patti talked to a teen-aged boy who said he was part of a Boy Scout troop from Connecticut who was there with his troop on a trip. Nice. When I was in Boy Scouts on Long Island, we took trips to Baiting Hollow, Suffolk County. Hedge fund manager children from Connecticut go to Bermuda.
- We have all heard of Bermuda shorts, right? Well, in Bermuda, they are an acceptable way to dress at work. I walked in to a very nice office building, wearing a suit with others equally dressed, preparing to meet up with some other business people. Out of the elevator comes this senior looking exec, wearing a blue sports jacket, white shirt, red tie and dark blue shorts with dark blue socks pulled up past his calves and dress shoes. I was told it is very common for bank and financial CEOs to dress like that. The official rule is the shorts have to be 2 inches above the knee and the socks are up to the bottom of the knee, so probably less skin is exposed than most skirts women wear, but it threw me off to see it. But pretty cool.
Overall it was a great weekend. We would love to bring the kids with us some day, but it was a perfect 48 hour vacation with just the two of us. We got some sun, got to sit and talk, did some sight seeing, took some pictures, read books and newspapers, and ate and drank a lot. We appreciate Mom J watching our kids so we didn’t have to worry and take advantage of a business trip there already. It’s a 2 hour plane ride from most east coast cities and is set up to make life easy for US residents (you can use Bermudian and US dollars interchangeable, they are the same value). The beaches are beautiful and the water is an amazing shade of blue. Oh, and the local drink is called a Dark and Stormy, a shot of dark rum and ginger beer. Great drink although a lot of sugar. I would recommend the island to anyone, especially for a short vacation, and suitable for children or just adults.
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