Brian W May:
Very entertaining, that little ditty, Brian! Thanks for re-activating some of my fading memories.
The Belize job was one of those sunny trips I referred to in my Christmas 'hard luck' post above #4536. Some of us groundies were unfortunate enough to have to put up with a couple of weeks or so at the Nassau Beach Hotel - things got even worse for me later, as I had to do it all over again, during the recovery phase
.
Things got off to a cracking start for those of us on the Nassau detachment - the brown jobs (allegedly) fired the starting pistol about 48 hours later than advertised, so there was precious little for us to do for a day or two. We made a start on our suntans, courtesy of the adjacent Cable Beach, and got in some practice in trying to make the perfect Wallbanger - the functional testing of same was a popular gig. Perhaps this was because the groundcrew variation of the Harvey Wallbanger recipe was concocted in rather industrial-sized quantities e.g. Take one clean metal waste bin, etc. IIRC the bottle with the bat on the label, obtainable from the 'licor store' outside the hotel cost around $2.50 for a 40-ouncer!
Luckily, I had drawn the short straw and was on the night shift; staging through just the one aircraft (usually) returning from Belize most nights was a really hard slog! Again, fortune was on my side as my room (half of a suite) was directly above the aptly named "Peanut Taylor's Drumbeat Club"
: being on nights thus limited my exposure to the Caribbean rhythms emanating from below.
We groundies usually ate at the airport: the workers' canteen did an excellent grouper salad and a large beer for 5 dollars, although I did have the odd brekkie or two at the Howard Johnson at the front of the hotel. A fabulous time was had by us all, we even received some rather good rates from the detachment paymaster
.