Two notable exceptions - just before this past Super Bowl kicked off, the power went out on all of St. John and St. Thomas. While Shane and Jason walked down to the Westin, whose generators ensured that their guests wouldn't miss a single play, Leslie and I hung out with the dogs and just talked until power was restored. That was with 10 minutes or so left in the second quarter. It's a good thing we weren't emotionally vested in either of the participating teams because, as you may know, by that time the game, for all intents and purposes was over. No worries.
The next extended outage occurred a couple of Saturdays ago. Leslie was babysitting, and the rest of us were sitting out on the front porch when we heard/saw everything shut off. It wasn't dark yet, so we just hung out, had a cocktail or two, and waited it out. When it got dark the bugs chased us indoors. We turned on a battery powered camp lantern, got out a deck of cards, Shane got out his Itouch, and we went "old school". We were enjoying it so much that when the power came back on a couple of hours later, we merely switched the light source from the camp lantern to a lamp and went on playing...
Sunday morning - Easter Sunday! No egg hunt, no brunch, not much to mark the occasion for us - although Leslie did play "Easter Bunny" by getting some of the requisite treats for the mom whose kids she sat on Saturday night. So what did we do? Leslie, Jason, and myself were up early to watch a soccer game on TV (OK - Leslie would have been up anyway, but she did help cheer "our team" on to victory). After that Jason went back to bed and Leslie and I made a quick run over to Hart Bay to hunt for treasure (primarily sea glass). We came back, took Jason to work, and generally relaxed for most of the afternoon. Leslie had a babysitting gig in prestigious Peter Bay, where she would be watching some little ones whose parents were attending a wedding. Shane mentioned that he was considering going on Cruz Bay Watersports' sunset sail, and since I had nothing better to do I decided to join him. We took the ten minute walk up and down hills to the Westin and boarded Island Spirit for our adventure.
This catamaran is rated by the Coast Guard for 74 passengers. Shane told me that CBW limits the number of guests on the sunset cruise to 50. Maybe it was because people had other Easter plans, perhaps a lot of them were heading home after spending Easter week on island, but for whatever reasons, there were only 16 guests aboard our cruise - we felt as though we had the vessel to ourselves!
It was a glorious way to end Easter Sunday!
Monday, it was back to our ho-hum existence;
Breakfast with friends whose too short island visit was coming to an end,
A little shopping in town (for an event we'll be celebrating and relating later),
Happy hour at St. John Guest Suites,
Joining some other friends that were visiting the island for a wonderful dinner at Rhumblines.
Tuesday, after way too long of an absence, I made a return to the underwater world. I've spent a good deal of time on, in, and around the ocean, but had not been scuba diving for at least a couple of years. I took advantage of the family discount afforded to us at Cruz Bay Watersports and hopped on their two tank morning dive. When the crew couldn't locate the wreck of The General in a timely manner we moved on and dove at Alan's Cut, off of Grass Cay, and then dove the back side of Steven's Cay.
Later I got a text from our friends Deb and Jay (who live on St. Thomas). They had been over in Tortola checking out a sailboat they are buying, and since they had to come to St. John to check in they decided to have happy hour over here. I met them at High Tide, and apparently the boat was in better condition than expected - you couldn't wipe the big grin off of Jay's face!
Thursday was supposed to be our "Dive the BVIs" trip, but it got canceled. So it was another two tank morning dive with CBW. This time my friend David was with me. He would be leaving island soon and wanted to get one last dive in before doing so, and this was it! Turns out it was a great day for it - we went to two very nice sites, Calf Rock and Ledges of Little St. James. Our divemaster, Ryan, killed a lionfish on each dive, so the tourists on board got a "show"!
While we dove, Leslie hung our with Carol and collected "treasure" while enjoying each others' company while they still could.
Moving to a place where you know some people, but don't really have any deep friendships is tough. meeting people in the same situation that you form an instant bond with makes things much nicer. And losing them is sad, but we weren't done with them just yet! Just as we try to appreciate every moment on this rock (the big one we all live on as well as the tiny one we moved to), we found ourselves milking the last bit of quality time with our friends. The boats, scuba, seaglass, and laughing over drinks are all just icing on the cake!
