04-24-08

The island lifestyle is starting to get to us. If there is such thing as island fever, then we're suffering from it. In particular, the mosquitos. The beginning and end of each day involve taking inventory of bites and a five-minute scratching section. Kathleen has become particularly obsessed with catching and destroying the buggers. I suppose it's evolution at the more baser level - she's obtained an uncanny ability to spot and hear flying insects. To me, I've given in. I figure if I whore my blood and skin out, I'll be the least desirable tourist on the island.

It's worked. For the most part, the number of bites of declined quite exponentially as a function of time on island and inversely proportional with Kathleen's focus on them. Meanwhile, Kathleen's skin looks like Midway circa post WWII. It's riddled with morters and the remnants of trenches dug not by soldiers but her own fingernails.

We began the day with our first travel incident. We somehow lost Kathleen's cell phone. In true tunnel vision fashion, we were all-engines focused on figuring out how to manage potential financial risk of a rogue island cell phone raider against the need to receive voicemail that would solidify our future plans. A couple hours later and much to the chagrin of yesterday's get-on-line-via-tethered-modem, we arrived to an amiable solution.

Thus began our day's activity: a rather challenging hike to Brown Bay. Traversing 2 miles of dung infested trail with quite steep climbs we reachd Brown Bay. Apparently, it's a tradition to line the path to the beach with Conch shells. I suppose there our lots of little "Piggy's" on this island. As for Brown Beach, I verified it was indeed proven incorrect that it was not named after someone w/ the familial name Brown, but rather, it's really brown. We thought we would be met with similar Carribean paradise as with the end of the Reef Bay Trail but we were met with a brown, grassy beach of which, I chose not to do my typical snorkel and 30 minute swim. Besides, the prior day we were hit with flash rains and I didn't want to be caught up in any swells in 50ft+ deep waters.

[insert: brown beach]

We made the hike back and drove east to East End. It's a collection of exclusive vacation homes primarily owned for the purpose of income generation. As I mentioned, everyone here is a marketer / capitalist even if ironically they moved here to escape the 'down and dirty doldrums' of life on the mainland. Homes were riddled with www.spendyourhomeequityfordreamvacation here.com type of signs. But, they were beautiful homes with spectacular views in a section of an already sparsely populated island that is even more remote and untouched. As we meandered and swerved the 30 degree inclines/declines in our Jeep, I managed to get myself, the driver, car sick. However, we were blessed with these wonderful views:

[insert: east end]

Any other day and we would have stopped to relax and snorkel on the beach but today, the 4am PSP session (BTW, thanks Shaun for lending it to me, I think I'm about 60% of the way through GTA Liberty City) really put a damper on the energy level. Lethargic at that as we crawled our jeep at 20 mph back home.

And that's when it started. GRILL SESSION III. Somehow, the third time you do something, the romantic notion of number one and the focus on improvement on number three, becomes a grasp at experience of the past. This time, however, Kathleen had happen to wake up early (probably due to nightmarish images of mosquitos in the mist) at 6:30 to prepare some great shish kababs. In true American fashion, we grilled up a mean dinner, working our way through our second propane cannister.

In anycase, I'm trying to write more but I keep defaulting to scratching my legs. More tomorrow! We have to wake up early to do a sail to the Baths and the British Virgin Islands!