All Hands On Deck   Adventures on land and at sea

Where did I leave off?

Not where I left off, but a blog-worthy moment nonetheless. Here is Kate and her hungry iguana friend.

Ah yes, everyone was leaving. It took as long for people to trickle out as it did for them to trickle in before the wedding. That was kind of nice, since it gave Lee and I more opportunities for one-on-one time with our guests. Some were even lucky enough to have us sleeping in their eco-tent! The wedding night was our last night in our own tent so we moved in with my brother and his girlfriend the next night and my Dad and Peggy the following night.

At that point everyone was pulling out of Concordia. I was ready to leave too. Lee had come down with a horrible cold. He spent one night with a fever and chills and then settled into severe head cold symptoms after that. Still, we moved ahead with the plan to camp at Cinnamon Bay with Doug. The three of us shared a taxi with my Dad and Peggy on their way to the ferry terminal. It dropped us off at the Cinnamon Bay campground and we set up our tents in our campsite.

It wasn’t a bad setup. The campsite had a wood platform for our tents and a tarp suspended from the trees to shelter the platform. We spent the rest of that day alternately frying on the hot beach and cooling off in the ocean. Dinner at the campground restaurant was actually pretty good.

It rained that night, of course. Our tents stayed mostly dry but no one slept well. The rain continued for most of the next day, eventually flowing under our tent floors and confining us to the covered campground eating area. We finally got up the motivation to hike and then hitchhike into Cruz Bay for dinner and cold meds for Lee.

Our final night on St. John was wet but included some special entertainment of the furry animal variety. I was still trying to fall asleep when I head a rustling sound in Doug’s tent followed by a yell. Something was in his tent and had brushed up against his leg. Lee shone his headlamp over and eventually a furry animal scurried out through the hole chewed in the tent’s screen.  I, at least, got a big kick out of the whole fiasco. I spent a while laughing as hysterically as one can laugh when half asleep in a wet tent.

We broke camp early the next morning and started our long journeys to the mainland. Doug had a direct flight to New York from St. Thomas but Lee and I had a rough trip out to California. We stopped in Puerto Rico and Maimi. Our flight from Maimi was severely delayed so we got on an earlier one, which also ended up delayed. Our epic day finally ended in a hotel at the LA airport. From there, we took Amtrak to Solana Beach and crashed at the beach house.

Yes, all my hair is gone. I'm annoyed that it ended up longer than I wanted.

Here we are, basking in the cushyness of a real house with soft beds, a real kitchen, and internet. I don’t know if I want this week to end!