Caribbean
4/6/06 - 6/3/06
This part of the trip is the designated decompression stop to bleed out the poisons of valley life before continuing on to see the world. So far it's working. The nightmares still come, but at least now only when I sleep.We packed up our life into 13 gallon plastic boxes and left the valley on April 4th, 2006. After a quick stopover in St. Thomas, we found ourselves in the Dominican Republic wondering how we ever lived without fresh mangos.
We learned two items for future consideration on the first month here. First, we loved quiet parts of the Dominican Republic, will go back and think you should go as well. I'm sure the exclusive resorts are also nice, but we'll take the Jimenoa valley and Samana peninsula any day. The next lesson was that sailing is a blast. We talked about buying a small sailboat to cruise the islands for a while. Maybe that's a bit deeper than I really want to jump in given that planning our next break from the real world while still on this vacation seems a little excessive. But that's how much we liked it. Jump on any chance you get to sail the islands.
The Dominican Republic
4/6/06 - 4/26/06
The DR was designed as a decompression stop. The goal was to find a place we could happily spend the afternoons in a tree waiting for our worries to melt away. Las Galeras turned out to be the perfect spot
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St. Thomas Carnival
4/28/06 - 4/29/06 (and 4/5/06)
We were lucky enough to catch Carnival on St. Thomas just before we sailed. It's not Rio, but still interesting. They do a Children's Parade on Friday and then an all day Carnival parade through the streets on Saturday. We're too impatient to wait for the parade to come to us, so we walked backwards through the show.
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Sailing the Virgin Islands
4/30/06 - 5/5/06
How's this for scary - imagine either one of us at the helm of a 43' sailboat. But we did it and nobody was seriously injured. In fact, we had fun, actually learned how to sail and think we'll do it again.
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St. John
5/5/06 - 5/7/06
We spent a little time at an eco-hippie lodge on St. John while waiting for our plane to Dominica. Maho Bay is the antithesis to all things Virgin Islands. Old-school, granola and alternative lifestyle hippies, recycling, yoga, rubber clog shoe thingies and good, affordable meals.
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Dominica
5/7/06 - 5/15/06 and 6/1/06 - 6/4/06
Dominica is the eco-tourist's home. Plenty of rainforest to stumble through with a minimum of tourists - and they speak English! There are so few tourists because there are basically no usable beaches. Can't have everything, I suppose. But we couldn't even find a hammock on the island. Somehow, we managed to have fun in spite of it all.
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St. Lucia
5/15/06 - 5/19/06
St. Lucia is the all about the beaches - and a haven for the cruise crowd. We did our best to spend time on the former while avoiding the latter. We had a fun surprise to learn that Marigot Bay, where we stayed was the site for filming the original Dr. Doolittle!
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Martinique
5/19/06 - 6/1/06
A piece of France glimmering in the ocean. Our two weeks here was all about napping in the sun. And maybe a little ping pong in the shade.
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Tortola
6/1/06 - 6/3/06
Our final stop before heading home was the island of Tortola so we could dive the wreck of the Rhone, a 1860's British postal steamship that sank in a hurricane at nearby Salt Island. I wish we'd save a bit more time to visit other sights here, most notably the odd boulder formations of the Baths on the neighboring island of Virgin Gorda.
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