This morning Mary Margaret and I decided to walk over to the local supermarket to restock some of our fresh vegetables. As we crossed the main road and headed over towards the supermarket, we were accosted by two hawkers who pressed a small pamphlet into each of our hands. This is something that we are used to since many of the islands we go to are vacation destinations and ports of call with the cruise ship industry. Thus, at times, the islands are swarming with tourists and people hawking goods just comes with the territory.

Whenever this happens, we politely tell them we are not interested and continue to walk on. Eventually, the hawkers get the idea and leave us alone. Well, not today. This time they insisted that we peal down the bottom portion of the handout to see if we won anything. I just ignored this come on but Mary Margaret, being politer then me, followed the instructions. When she did, she discovered that she was a winner! I then pealed the bottom portion of my handout and discovered that I was a loser. No surprise there!

The hawkers got real excited and showed Mary Margaret that she had won one of three options: a $1000, a $600 Android tablet or $500. All she needed to do to claim her prize … and here is the come on… was attend a 60 minute presentation for a time share that was right down the road. Plus, as part of that presentation, we would get a free lunch.

Now, we have seen these come-ons before and we are not interested in any timeshares at this point in our lives but… a $1000, a $600 tablet, or $500 is hard to walk away from. Thus, grudgingly we agreed to be scammed.

Actually, the resort is rather nice, the lunch was free and tasty and our guide was very pleasant. However, the high-pressure salesman was a little much. The high end timeshare was pitched as costing $60,000 … but wait … if we bought right there on the spot, it would be reduced to just $38,000! Plus, a “free” week would be thrown into the deal for just $189. We were confused, if it is free, why did one have to pay $189? The answer was that was just an administrative fee. We must have had “Stupid” written on our foreheads for that one.

Needless to say, we did not buy the timeshare and needless to say, we did not win $1000, a $600 tablet or the $500. Instead, the tablet that we walked away with was one that would normally sell for about $40. We know since we just researched tablets last week.

However, we did get a nice lunch and Mary Margaret will dedicate this little tablet for games that she enjoys playing. All this only costed us two hours of our time and, right now, time is something we have plenty of as we wait for the storms that are sweeping across the North Atlantic to clear out. Just another day in the lives of cruisers…