11:38 am
While unpacking, I hear a polite knock. "Door's open!" Two ladies enter, one carrying a martini glass filled with chunks of succulent Antiguan black pineapple – yellow despite its name – and the other holding a plate of sweets. Eighteen days earlier, Jumby Bay e-mailed me asking if I had any special requests. The pineapple was the first, but the sweets are a happy extra. After the women leave, I wonder about the other requests. There on my coffee table is #2: a CD by the soca band Red Hot Flames. I play it and listen awhile, stretched out on my carved four-poster bed.

1:15 pm
Only one hand is needed to steer my Ultra Cruz bike to Pasture Bay Beach because the three-mile paved path that rings the island is quite flat. I cruise past manicured grass and the driveways of the island's 40 or so private manses. Nearly empty Pasture Bay complements the lapis sea, and I coax picture after picture from my digital camera, though it complains of low batteries.

4:45 pm
Embarrassed, I sit alone on the resort's ferry that's making a special trip for me. I'd taken the seven-minute ride across to mainland Antigua before realizing I'd left my wallet in my room. I'm heading to Shirley Heights, the site of a weekly sunset party with food, booze and live steel-pan and reggae music on Antigua's south coast. Maybe I'll bring the ferry captain a rum punch as thanks. But then I decide against it. He is driving.

9:56 pm
After roasted mahi-mahi with pawpaw and plum-tomato salsa in Jumby Bay's Estate House restaurant, an ivy-covered 230-year-old former plantation manor, I'm in my villa considering my options: bathe in the deliciously large tub or outside in the private shower-nook? There's really no question. I tote Jumby's luxe Lady Primrose's products outside and disrobe. Showering out in the open is thrilling, and with its privacy walls, no one can see me. I look up for constellations, and stars wink at me from the night's dark sky.