Living up to its name - exploring Gold Rock

Mu and I had the pleasure of spending this past weekend on one of the other islands, Grand Bahama. On the Grand Bahama, we spent our time in Freeport/Lucaya -- The Bahamas' second largest city and quite a contrast from Nassau.

Nassau has tons of houses and streets from before 1800. These are right in the center of town and it is a fun part of walking around for lunch or something to think about -- a direct history that goes back a couple of centuries. On the flip side, the traffic can be quite bad with traffic patterns that go back at least a couple of decades. The balance is most certainly positive, but the congestion of Nassau has been a bit of surprise.

Freeport is a contrast, it is a planned city that is quite spaced out with grand boulevards dissecting the city of about 40,000. I was brought over to the city for work which was a fun reason for travel. Travel with a purpose has always been our favorite type of trip.

We arrived on Friday night.  I worked on Saturday and then we rented a car for Sunday and headed towards the east side of the island.   On the east side, we checked out the Lucayan National Park. This park is wonderful, it has a couple of the blue holes that are mesmerizing. It also has some nice mangrove swamps that are haven to tons of birds.

Those are both nice, worth a trip for sure. But the clear highlight of the park, and the island generally in our view, is the Gold Rock Beach. It is the leader in the pack for the nicest beach in the Bahamas in my limited sample. We walked through the mangrove swamp and came to this perfectly white sand beach with crystalline water of that special hue that seems endemic to the Bahamas. We were the only people on the beach, which made it even better.

The beach is littered with these massive driftwood stumps, all twisted and mangled and bleached by the powerful sun. Mu headed over to a sand bar and set up shop for some serious sun bathing. I think she must have been looking forward to this kind of relaxing for weeks.

Since sun bathing is not really my speed I got on my snorkeling gear and swam the half mile to Gold Rock. The swim was kind of dreary since the reef only started a half mile out. But man was it worth the swim, as the coral on the reef had spectacular colors and some crazy big structures. The complex arrangements of the reef were really impressive, especially when some of the lincoln log-esque coral arrangements had super heavy coral sitting on top of something that looked like it wouldn't support more than twenty pounds.

After a bit of exploring it was time for me to make the swim back to my lovely wife. We had both gotten just what we wanted from our day at this most perfect beach. The gold in the name is well deserved and I have a new standard bearer for best beach in the Bahamas.