This blog post is the second and final part of my posts about Caribbean islands. I was hoping to plan a cycling holiday to Guadeloupe in January 2023 as it is particularly great for cycling. We also wanted to include a visit to Barbados. We had postponed a holiday to Barbados from earlier this year due to COVID and had been given some British Airways vouchers to use before September 30th, 2023.
The new plans tied me up in knots for several reasons. I thought that perhaps we could begin our trip in Barbados and take a cruise-only trip to Guadeloupe. I looked at cruise-only options. The problem with this is that they’re expensive, just do a loop and I suspect I wouldn’t enjoy a cruise. Why? For one thing, I want to eat my food in local restaurants where the locals eat and where the food is cooked by local people. I don’t enjoy quizzes; karaoke and I find spa treatments expensive and unnecessary. I’m not particularly sociable and would be irritated by the feeling that I had to talk to people all the time. I’d be happy to sit on my balcony with a book and a drink and watch the scenery go by. But, maybe, I’ll take a cruise one day and find that I love it. Perhaps the enjoyment depends on the type of cruise. But I expect that those that I can afford would not be enjoyable as far as I’m concerned. We could have taken a ferry. This would have taken about eight hours each way and seemed excessive.
There are many airlines offering lights around the Caribbean. These are reasonably priced at the moment but it would be expensive to prebook for early next year as the prices are about three times as much right now.
It turns out that the easiest way to get to Guadeloupe is to fly with Air France. I had thought that you would need to fly from Lyo but now Skycanner is putting up flights that go from UK airports: we could have gone from Manchester and changed in Paris for less than £500 return each. But there’s no point because we can’t use our BA vouchers. I then thought – why don’t we use the BA vouchers to take us on a few small holidays this year instead of one big one. And then go to Guadeloupe using Air France in 2024. The trouble with this is that BA tends to fly out of London and not Manchester so we would need to take two flights to places where you can easily get a direct flight with a company such as Easyjet from Manchester.
I then wondered if we could fly somewhere else far away this year as a single trip. One place we would like to visit is Japan. The trouble with this is that Japan has not opened up its borders to tourists yet due to COVID. I knew this because we went to a Japanese restaurant recently and a waitress there was telling us that she hadn’t been able to go home since before the pandemic. I checked and this is still the case.
After all this I felt really quite defeated – I know, first world problems. Howard suggested that we go to Barbados and be done with it and just take the bike and see what we could do. I looked on Vrbo on Barbados going as cheap as I could with the best reviews and found a lovely rural apartment for £42 / night. Wow! The owner recommended that visitors hire a car or a BIKE!! We used Google Maps to explore the local area and it looks very bike-friendly. The flights are a little more expensive that our vouchers but the accommodation is much cheaper than the £58/night we were going to pay before (which was also very cheap and for which we got a full refund). We’ve opted to go for a few extra nights.
The Number 200: Neighbouring Primes
Although 200 is not prime, the previous prime is 199 and the next prime is 211.
So why aren’t 201,202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210 prime?
Well, remember that a prime is only divisible by 1 and itself. So remove any numbers in the above list divisible by 2 from the list 201,202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210
This leaves: 201,203, 205, 207, 209
Remove further low-hanging fruit. 205 is divisible by 5 (it ends with 5) leaving
201, 203, 207, 209
Another easy observation is to spot numbers divisible by 3 by adding their digits which will also be divisible by 3:
201: 2 + 0 + 1 = 3 (divisible by 3)
203: 2 + 0 + 3 = 5 (not divisible by 3)
207: 2 + 0 + 7 = 9 (divisible by 3)
209: 2 + 0 + 9 = 11 (not divisible by 3)
This leaves two numbers: 203 and 209.
The number 7 is worth trying as a divisor. We know that 7 x 30 = 210: 7 x 3 = 21 and 21 x 10 = 210. Because of this we can see than 203 = 210 – 7 which must also be divisible by 7.
Now we’re just left with 209. This again is quite easy. It is 11 less than 220 and 220 is 2 x 110. It’s easy to see that 110 = 11 x 10.
So now we’ve established why all of the numbers between 200 and 211 are no prime.
Last Thoughts
I don’t usually write about places I’m actually going to visit and am about to book and I found this very useful. I hope you enjoyed reading it and I also hope that Howard and I will visit Guadeloupe one day with our tandem.