Well, here I am, 5 months later, writing about a trip I took before the trip to Spain that I actually sat down to write about. Unlike previous blogs, I’m just going to do one long page here, and sort of break it up. This is partly because I’m lazy and partly because the Internet is so garbage now that tasks I could complete with a 2011 iPad that barely worked now take a significant amount of computing resources, and seem to be harder and harder to work with.
ANYWAY, if you don’t want to read, but want to see how the trip went, go ahead and check out the YouTube playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVsVMH5_TtfFXkbhzqcLiajSHj24BorQ5&si=TW29Ke5LL2UK6Mbo
Trip Introduction
This trip was a first for me in many respects. It was my first time to the Caribbean. The closest I had previously been was Costa Rica back in like 2013/2014. It was also the first rich person SAILBOAT vacation. In fact, it wasn’t just a sailboat…it was a catamaran! Yup, that’s right. 9 of us were to all split space on a catamaran sailboat and yacht around the British Virgin Islands for a week. Hard life. Don’t worry; we had Moorings provide us with a captain so we didn’t smash the boat on some rocks somewhere, although I’m sure we would have managed.
Days 0-3: Getting There and Exploring Road Town
If you are a geography buff, you would know that both the U.S. Virgin Islands and British Virgin Islands are quite tiny. The largest island in USVI is Saint Thomas, and the largest island in BVI is Tortola. These islands are like 30 and 20 square miles, respectively. “AI” tells me that Ellicott City, Maryland, is 30 square miles. It feels even less than that, too, as these islands are just rapidly up-sloping mountains. So the livable space is the small “flat” parts of land near the harbor.
Yet somehow, we still needed to rent a car on Tortola to do any real exploration. So that is what we did on the first few days. We flew into Saint Thomas, took a taxi to a ferry, grabbed a ferry to Tortola, then explored Road Town and the surrounding areas.
One of the fun parts on the flight in was seeing all of the cruise ships. I won’t bore you with all 90 images, but here are a few:
Oh, and here is one of the islands in the Bahamas, I think:
I should have written this above, but I’m probably not going to proofread this, so good luck reading it.
Oh, and you know what? Here are some fun shots from the ferry ride from Saint Thomas to Road Town:
We had a tip from family members to fill out some forms while on the ferry ride to be ready for customs when we showed up in Road Town. My brother was helping literally everyone on the boat fill out there forms through app. In this process, we met a dude from NOAA. We talked to him for a bit and found out that his thesis was on the sounds of Minke Whales. Here is an example of what it sounds like:
https://youtu.be/CrzTl3c-DuM?si=PraNUoVM-sQDRrXu
Star Wars, baby. I swear I found the dude’s thesis, but I can’t seem to find it now. Oh well, I’m sure it’s great.
ANYWAY, there’s no real way to get around Tortola without a car. In fact, when cruise ships show up in Road Town, which they do every day, there is a MAD DASH to all of the taxis, where the people are transported all around the island for their outings. Fortunately, this infrastructure allowed us to fairly easily rent a piece of shit car, which we did.
In both Virgin Islands, the currency is USD. However, they drive on the wrong side of the road, so that was fun. Also, the roads are all terrible. I won’t go into too much detail in all of our various land excursions, but here are some photos:
We also did PLENTY of snorkeling on these days. It’s become one of my favorite things to do. We saw a lot of cool shit, but here’s something REAL cool:
Days 4+
After our fun on Road Town, it was time to get serious and meet up at our sailboat that we were going to spend 6 days on. It was a pretty dope looking boat:
FORTUNATELY, we had a captain. This meant that 1) we didn’t have to learn about the about at all and 2) someone else was responsible for crashing it.
I’m sure Moorings does some psychological matching, but we had the coolest dude for a captain. His name was Kedan, and he was originally from Grenada. I don’t know much about Grenada, but I watch so much track and field, so I was able to pretend like I knew something about Grenada by talking about their great javelin thrower and decathlete.
But yeah, Kedan was so cool. It could have been a terrible trip if we had a shit captain, but this dude was 100% rad. Would recommend.
Anyway, I’m not going to do a detailed play-by-play of what we did each day. Bae actually wrote that all down, so maybe I’ll take some images and post them at the end. Instead, I’ll just lazily post some photos and links to youtube videos.
Yes, we did got to the Baths. Yes, we did go to Anegada. Yes, we did go to all the touristy drinking spots and saw the {insert gimmick that white people love here}. However, my favorite part was just jumping in the water and swimming around with my goggles. I didn’t even use snorkel gear most of the time. Anyway, enjoy the photos:
And then for some more looks into the adventures, how about some youtube vids:
And then check the full playlist for all the various animals we saw. So good.
Day ?? – End
We got to spend a few days in Saint Thomas as well before the trip ended. Here are some photos from there:
The Sacred Texts by Bae
Part of why I was so lazy above is that during the boat trip, Bae filled out the boat travel log so we could remember what we did. I attach photos below:
Thanks to the fam for making the trip happen, and thanks to Pyle for watching our cats while we were away.