Jake & Hazel - March, 2014
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Grand Lido Negril March 17 to March 21, 2014 Jake and Hazel from Chicago This was our very first trip to Grand Lido Negril. I know that it has gone through several changes (in name and in ownership) lately, and many people are probably curious about what has changed at the resort. Unfortunately, as it was our first trip, I can’t really tell you! But I can tell you what we saw and experienced. Also, as we have each been to Hedo II close to thirty times, I can tell you how it differs from Hedo, so maybe that will be instructive to some readers. We only had time for a short trip this time around, and I was not hell bent on going to GLN, or even to Jamaica for that matter. But believe it or not, the only vacation destination with reasonably priced and reasonably scheduled direct flights from Chicago was Montego Bay, which meant Jamaica was the winner. And GLN was about the best deal I could find for a four-night trip. Rather than a blow-by-blow, day-by-day account, I’ll break this report down by topics. Feel free to skip the ones that don’t interest you, unless you are a fan of my florid prose. Here we go! Bus Ride: The last time we went to Jamaica, it was to Hedo II when airport transfers were provided by Superclubs. That was obviously not an option here, but Denny and Go Classy provided us with bus transfers that were pretty much the same thing. Pretty much, but not exactly. On the plus side, the bus was huge and luxurious, compared to the old “bus to Cartegena” vehicles that we used to ride in. That was nice. On the down side, we made many more stops at resorts along the way. That had the effect of slowing down the ride considerably. But, it was nice to see the lobbies of some of the newer resorts on the way to Negril. Overall, including some nasty road construction, the trip took about two hours. Check-In: Checking in was pretty standard. Front desk, paperwork, wait an hour, come back for your keys. A nice lady walked us to our room, where our luggage had already been delivered. They also gave us a coupon book worth $1250 in resort credits! Wow, you say! Unfortunately, it was pretty much useless. The coupons were for small discounts on large ticket items. Sure, they probably totaled to $1250, but you’d have to spend many thousands of dollars to redeem them all. We ended up not using any of them. Buffet: I was surprised to learn that GLN does not have a dinner buffet every night. They have a nice breakfast and lunch buffet every day, but dinner buffet only occurs on Monday and Friday. The Monday night buffet is actually on the beach, and was quite fun. The food was pretty good, although since it was our arrival day, I was tired and don’t remember much of the details. The Friday night buffet is the “Grand Gala” which I assume is much like the Hedo Friday Night Grand Gala Buffet, but as we left Friday morning, we didn’t get to sample it. Breakfast and Lunch buffets were much like the Hedo breakfast and lunch buffets that I’m already accustomed to. They have the traditional omelet station, which is great, and the traditional huge bin of bacon, plus all the other usual items. One thing they do NOT have, though, which I consider a huge negative, is a self-service coffee station. You want coffee in the morning? You sit down and wait for them to bring it to you. Maybe for some folks, this is acceptable. For me, it is not. I want my coffee NOW, dammit. If I wanted it five minutes from now, I’d have slept another five minutes. I was really disappointed by this system, but that’s probably just me. Restaurants: GLN has four, maybe five, restaurants, depending on what you count. Only one of them requires (or even takes) reservations. I know these have changed from recent times, so listen closely. Three of them are in the Central Facilities building, behind the main lobby. Working your way from the lobby toward the ocean, they are, in order: Olives (the Mediterranean restaurant), Insomnia Café, and Amore (the Italian restaurant). We ate at Olives once. It is right behind the lobby. You need long trousers and a collar shirt. I would have called it a Greek restaurant, based on the menu. The food was quite good, and the ambiance was very romantic. We stuck our noses into the Insomnia Café, but didn’t partake of anything there. It’s open 24 hours, but just serves coffee and pastries, and I hear that they have ice cream but couldn’t vouch for that. It looks sort of like a generic Starbuck’s. They have coffee beans scattered on the little tables near the sugar packets. Cute. We ate at Amore twice. It is at the very far end of the Central Facilities, near the beach. It is a big, round, airy room, glassed in like a large aquarium. All of the tables are on an elevated platform for some reason. They claim to have a “resort casual” dress code, whatever that means, but it looked to me like pretty much anything was acceptable. The food was pretty good here; appetizers, salads, soups, pizza, pastas, meat dishes, and desserts. Once they brought our appetizer after our entrées, which was strange, but it worked out. If you leave the Central Facility and walk to the right along the beach, you get to the free-standing “Koi” (Japanese restaurant), which requires reservations. I also heard they have a stricter dress code. But as we never set foot inside, I couldn’t really say. The final restaurant, the Reggae Café, is to the left of the Central Facilities, on an upper deck of a triangular building. It has a Jamaican menu, all the usual stuff. Both lunch-sized portions and dinner-sized portions. We ate there once, and it was pretty good. Bars: Now, to a subject near and dear to my heart. There are four bars on the property, and I’m sad to say that they pale in comparison to the Hedo bars, or compared to many other places I’ve visited. They had pretty meagre selections of booze. I only saw a few options for gin, vodka, and whiskey. They seemed to have more options in the way of rum. But compared to a place like Hedo, the selection was pretty slim, and very few of what I would call “premium” brands. As a gin drinker, my best option was Beefeater, which I could only get at one bar. The Nude Beach Bar (technically called “Whoops!!”) is of course right next to the nude pool and the nude beach. Other than its slim choices of hooch, it also suffered from closing at six o’clock! That’s when the nude pool and hot tub closed, so I guess it makes sense, but still; drinking in a hot tub late into the night is part of the charm of a Jamaica vacation to me. Alas, not here. This bar did have a small grill attached, which served some very nice Jamaican Patties and some even nicer Jerk Lamb Chops, but had little else going for it. The Prude Beach Bar (aka, the “Joint Bar”) was at the far end of the very long prude beach. Putting it in the middle of the beach might have made more sense, but nobody asked me. Anyway, its selection was even more meagre than the Nude Beach Bar. I only visited it out of curiosity. It also closes at 6 pm. The best place to really get your drink on was the “Chill Bar” in the buffet area, which was open until midnight. They had a larger selection of drinks than either of the beach bars, but still sub-standard in my book. Finally, there was the “Martini Bar,” aka the Piano Bar. This was the most elegant, and was also open until midnight. The bartender (Cleon) was very chatty and entertaining, but that could have been because there were almost no customers to keep him busy working. They also had a better selection of booze than any of the other bars. Entertainment: They had “showtime” most nights in the buffet area. We didn’t see many of them, as there was no food there to accompany it, so we were mostly in one or another of the restaurants during the performances. The glimpses I saw of them appeared to be very similar to the Hedo nightly shows. The Piano Bar had Karaoke some nights, a piano player some nights, and nothing some nights. I don’t know the overall schedule. The one night that I was there for a piano player, the player was a gentleman named Ike. I remembered him from Hedo, and he remembered me, which was nice. Entertainment Coordinators: people who know me know that I loathe entertainment coordinators. At Hedo, they are noisy, pushy, and annoying. Well there was barely any sign of them at GLN. I endorse that approach! They showed up a few times, unexpectedly, to lead a game of bingo or whatever, but mostly seemed to keep out of sight. Plus one for GLN! Beaches: I guess I should discuss the beaches. I doubt these have changed much over the years. There were basically two zones: The prude beach was very long, very wide, and had very nice sand. We spent no time there at all, except to walk along it to check it out. There was a prude pool and hot tub, but it wasn’t near the beach; it was on the deck behind the “Central Facilities” building. And of course they didn’t call any of these facilities “prude.” That’s just my Hedo bias coming through. The nude beach was smaller and segmented into little sections, had minimal sand, and was kind of secluded. It had a small pool and an even smaller hot tub. I saw a game of volleyball in the pool one day, but it was clearly a cramped venue. The lounges were nice, very similar to the Hedo lounges. There were foam pads like you see anywhere, but also some thicker, spongier pads that didn’t look like they could survive rough weather. They were very comfy! Some lounges were “saved” for long periods and not used (which I consider quite rude), but it didn’t much matter, as there were plenty of them for the few patrons in attendance. There were also plenty of options if you wanted shade, sun, or a combination of both. Architecture: The buildings and grounds were much like Hedo, with a few differences. The similarities include a long string of free-standing, two-story buildings with both ocean view and garden view options, and sliding patio doors. The main difference, from the outside, is that GLN buildings have a crisp, well-maintained look as opposed to Hedo’s dilapidated look. Lines that were supposed to be straight and horizontal (such as hand railings and balcony ledges) actually were straight and horizontal! And the lawns were all well-manicured and crisply edged. The rooms were several notches nicer than Hedo rooms. For one, they were larger. They include a little galley, with a fridge that was always stocked with Red Stripe and soda and bottled water. There was a nice sofa facing the patio, and a huge bed with a carved headboard. The bathroom was fabulous; nicely tiled, huge, and almost high tech. The controls in the shower took a while to figure out, as there were so many water jets and knobs. Like the Hedo rooms, the sink faucets all turned the wrong ways. I always assumed this was just an idiosyncrasy at Hedo. Now I’m wondering if Jamaica just has different plumbing conventions than we have in the USA. The room safes are much like the Hedo safes, programmable with your own private code, and plenty big enough to hold a large laptop and all your valuables. And better yet, they are mounted at eye level! At Hedo, I always grumble as I have to squat down on my aging knees to reach the nearly floor-level safe. Mounted up high like this is the way to do it! Overall, the grounds and the buildings had a nice Victorian, late-British-empire feel to them, which I found reassuring. I like to think of Jamaica in the hey-day of British rule as one of the more elegant periods in the history of the Western hemisphere, and it’s nice to pretend to be a part of it. One difference from that Victorian feel was the main lobby. This had more of a faux-Roman feel to it, with large looming columns and slabs of marble. It’s like you wandered into a part of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The big tree at GLN has been discussed in several threads at Denny’s, so I won’t belabor it here. I don’t have any solid data about it, but it is a huge, apparently very old, spooky looking tree near the Reggae Café. Some say it was used to hang pirates in the old days. Some say it is haunted. Some don’t like to talk about it at all. I took lots of pictures of it. WiFi: They claim to have “free Wi-Fi” all over the grounds, and they do. But it is not perfect. The resort is far too large for a single Wi-Fi server to service all of it. But instead of using one Wi-Fi server with repeaters spread around at intervals, they chose to set up separate servers for many different locations, each with a different name. We found that to be a problem, depending on the nature of your device. One of our devices had no trouble latching onto whatever server was nearest, and seamlessly transferring to a different one as we moved around. But another device wasn’t able to do so, and had to be re-connected by hand every time we moved. No big deal if you are just working in your room, but we spent a lot of time roving, and it was a pain. But still, other than that, it was free, it was dependable, and it was convenient. You didn’t even need to enter a password. I liked it. People: The people at GLN, compared to people at Hedo, tend to be quiet, conservative, respectable, pleasant, and boring. Nobody wears slutwear. They are still friendly like Hedo people, but there was none of that instant camaraderie that I am accustomed to. There were a lot of Canadians, a lot of Americans, a few Europeans. But mostly, I was impressed by how few people there were at all! The buffet never seemed full, nor did any of the restaurants. The beaches were never crowded. There are a hell of a lot of rooms, but I can’t imagine more than a fraction of them were occupied. They do claim to have room service at GLN (we never tried it), so conceivably people just holed up in their rooms and never showed their faces. But what’s the point of that? You can do that at home. So I don’t get it. I should also add that there is no evidence of PDAs or whatever else you want to call it: no open sex, not even covert sex. No naughty games, no sexual vibe at all. No sexy clothing, sexy activities, or sexy anything. I don’t doubt that there was plenty of sex going on behind closed doors, but other than the chaste variety of nudity on the nude beach, the entire place was pretty much G-rated. Summary: Overall, we had a very nice, relaxing time, which was exactly what we were looking for. There was none of the fun of a Hedo trip, but that’s okay. We were only there for four nights. I don’t think I could have hauled my ass away from Hedo after only four nights. After four nights at GLN, I was very ready to head home, rested and relaxed. Here is a little summary chart: GLN Advantages vs. Hedo II: - Beach waitress service! very nice!! (actually, it was the bartender herself who came to take our orders and deliver our drinks) - Nicer rooms. - Wi-Fi included in the room rate. - Less dilapidated looking. - Minimal to non-existent ECs. - Safes at eye level! GLN Disadvantages vs. Hedo II: - No self-serve coffee (arghgh!!!) - Dead ambiance. - Boring (nice, but boring) people. No, I don’t mean you; I’m sure you are fascinating. But everyone else there was pretty boring. - Beach/Pool bars close unconscionably early. Photos: I took lots of photos while there. If Denny doesn’t mind, I will provide a link here to where you can see them. This is a Facebook album. You do NOT need to have a Facebook account or be a Facebook member to see them. All you have to do is click the link: If it doesn’t work, contact me and I’ll get you hooked up somehow. And if anyone has any specific questions, feel free to send me a Private Message through Denny’s board, or contact me directly at jcesarone999@gmail.com. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you at the beach!........Jake (and Hazel)
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