St. Lucia -- The Sights Part II: Flora, Fauna, and Pretty Water

There were all sorts of pretty things to look at in St. Lucia. The first was right outside our hotel room:

This is the view from our balcony. We shared a two bedroom unit at the Villa Beach Cottages with Darrin and Katie. It was the perfect place for us to stay: small, nice (but not too $$), and right on the beach. The beach was almost always empty, and other than the occasional sounds of the family with little kids that often occupied the pool, it was quiet enough to hear the birds whistling and the waves splashing against the sand.

Here are a few shots of the beach and my favorite hammock:

It was so nice to get up in the morning and take a little stroll. I try not to think about it now that I'm home and the alarm starts blaring at 6:00 a.m. and I'm off like a shot, trying to print a handout for seminary, get Wyatt his chocolate milk, find my shoes, stand at the foot of Elise's bed and beg her to actually sit up, etc. etc.

There aren't many non domesticated animals (should I try and tie in a transitional sentence that relates Elise in the morning to a non domesticated animal??? ah, naaahh) in St. Lucia -- not even many bugs, which was very nice, although I did manage to get a few mosquito bites. There are a lot of birds, though. I'm sure it would be a fun place for bird watchers to go.

I should know what this bird is (Aunt Julie, should you go ask Tom?) but we saw a lot of them on the island:

These little black and red birds were ubiquitous too, and very bold. They would eat right out of your hand:

Or right off of Forrest's shoulder:

And another bird (isn't this exciting?? :-):

And a bird with a mammal! There were a number of horses, goats, and dogs in St. Lucia (and all the dogs looked alike, skinny and long snouted), but I never saw a single rodent, even in the forest.

We also saw a bunch of lizards, and heard a bunch of frogs:

And ran across a number of crabs:

You can see his little crab face in the middle of the picture

We went on some lovely hikes, like this one to the botanical gardens:

And this one to the relics of an old British fort on the northern tip of the island. Fort Rodney was situated on the very top of the northernmost hill so they could spy on the French stationed in the neighboring island of Martinique.

Darrin and Katie, being huggie.

Forrest, pretending to warm his hands.

Forrest and Darrin, exploring the powder room. Which is room where they keep gun powder, not a ladies' restroom.

Can you believe I got close enough to the edge to take that picture?

Forrest, exploring the wrong end of a cannon.

Aforementioned cannon.

There were inscriptions like this all along the walls.

All the boats in the bay. And me, with beach hair.

Speaking of all the boats in the bay: Wow, there are a lot of rich people in the world. It's kind of stunning, really. While we were on this little hike, there was a couple with two kids and a grandma. We started talking to the grandma and she said she was with them for a little while (they'd just come from Argentina in their sail boat) and that her son and his wife had taken their two kids out of school for a year to home school them and sail around the world. The grandma seemed quite impressed and grateful that she was able to be there, and the son seemed to be younger than we were, which begs the question: if you did not inheret your money, how in the world are you rich enough by age 35 to quit your job, buy a yacht, and sail around the world with your small children? Just curious.

One of the only rainy days on the island, but it was a nice rain. Refreshing.

I love this shot with Forrest and Darrin in the corner. 

As far as other scenery goes, we must include the Pitons, which are the scenic symbol of St. Lucia:

I didn't look down for this picture

Swimming and snorkeling at the base of the Pitons 

A little bay between the two Pitons

Smokey and mysterious

The view from the restaurant at the Hotel de Chocolat (more on that later)

And to wrap things up for today, a few more pretty pictures of the ocean:

Lots of pictures in this post, but not a lot of people or stories. The people and stories are for next time. Deep breath!

St. Lucia -- The Sights Part 1: The People and the Towns

There's so much to blog about! Not only our St. Lucia trip, but three birthdays (Elise, Forrest, Jonas), a 2nd place Pinewood Derby win, Elise's school musical, and Ethan getting cast in his first big part in a high school play. Somehow, I'm going to try to tackle all of it before Easter rolls around and I get completely swamped, but the St. Lucia posts are going to be biggies all on their own. I decided it would be best to break the trip down into a few different posts: "St. Lucia Sights"(in at least two parts, I'm discovering as I write this all out) and "St. Lucia Experiences." A day-by-day blow-by-blow would simply take too long.

Not that these posts won't be super long, of course. I can't help it. You might just want to click through the pictures and save yourself the screen time. (Seriously! I'm mostly writing all of this down for myself and for my future posterity who will be held in thrall to detailed descriptions of their great-great grandparents' twentieth anniversary trips.) So without further ado . . . St. Lucia!

This is a glimpse of the beautiful island of St. Lucia outside the airplane window. For those of you who are interested in a little history: St. Lucia is an island in the eastern Caribbean. Venezuela is its closest non-island neighbor:

It's about 200 square miles and its center is covered in dense forest. It is famous for its mountains, most notably two tall peaks called the Pitons.

Forrest and me with the Pitons in the background

St. Lucia was originally inhabited by indigenous people called the Caribs, but when the Europeans arrived in the early 1500s, many Caribs were wiped out due to exposure to European diseases, as well as the Eurpoeans' propensity to enslave and then work to death many of the native people with whom they came in contact. The European settlers soon brought African slaves to the island to work on plantations as well, and it is from this African heritage that most native St. Lucians descend today.  (There's also a smattering of Indian heritage, also stemming from  Britain's desire to colonize the world.) The French and English fought over St. Lucia for years, and the island changed hands between the two countries 14 times, with the British ultimately claiming it in 1814. Although the national language is English (all the signage, commerce, etc. takes place in English) there's a decidedly French influence as well: not only are most of the place names French (Soufriere, Gros Islet), but native St. Lucians speak what they call "patois" (pronounced "patwah") a French/English/local Creole language that we American English speakers can't understand at all. One native St. Lucian told me that many of them speak patois at home, and it's not until they get to their British-style public schools that they start to learn English in earnest.

The people of St. Lucia are really beautiful. Nothing like sitting in a scuba boat with a bunch of shirtless 20-something St. Lucian men to make a person realize how much the tourists' freckly, pasty, puffy, hairy, sun-burny Northern European bodies were not, in fact, the genetic lottery winners on planet Earth. (I am generalizing here, of course, since I'm married to a prime specimen of Northern European good looks who is aware of the fact that I can admire the St. Lucian physique without being at all threatened. :-). I took a few candid photos of some of the local people, which horrified Elise ("Mom! Did they think you were stalking them or something?") But, for most of the photos, I had the camera with me in the car and was clicking and clicking out the window at all sorts of stuff. And I used a zoom. Just so nobody's horrified:

I loved the big blue turban on this woman's head. There are all sorts of women walking around dressed in business attire, too, especially in the bigger cities. I saw a lot more women in business attire than I did men.

Not our scuba boat! I snapped this shot from the beach outside our hotel. I'm guessing these guys were heading out to do some fishing.

The owner of our hotel, Colin, and the two very helpful women at the front desk.  So friendly, and gave us so many excellent insider tips.  

Two older women I snapped from our moving car. I loved all the color in St. Lucia: the clothes, the paint colors, the green green foliage, the flowers.

There was lots of dreadlocks and tie-dye: the island had a more Jamaican feel than I was expecting. And yes,  as this home shows, there was also a lot of poverty.

The terrible disparity between the poverty in the small towns as opposed to the luxury of some of the super-ritzy resorts was really disconcerting. Although part of me was glad to be contributing to the local economy, another part felt really guilty about the unfairness of it all. I'm very, very glad, though, that we decided to be brave and rent a car so we could see more of the "real" St. Lucia; in fact, zipping along the narrow streets, driving on the wrong side of the road (that British influence again), trying to negotiate all the hairpin bends on the steep mountain roads without killing ourselves, taking a wrong turn and getting lost in a small neighborhood full of banana plantation workers traipsing to the fields with machetes at their sides (and staring at us like we were the craziest white people they'd ever seen) -- those were some of my favorite experiences of the whole trip. Well, okay, I could have done without the grasping-the-door-handle-closing-my-eyes-and-saying-a-prayer style of driving . . . but now that we're home, and alive, I'm glad we did it. The vast majority of vacationers in St. Lucia either arrive via cruise ship or stay at all inclusive resorts, leaving only when a tour bus pulls up to transport them to the next tourist spot, but if anyone I know is heading to St. Lucia? I'd recommend they do it our way (of course!). Provided that they have guys like Forrest or Darrin who are willing to drive. I never could have done the driving myself. Oh no.

Here are a few more shots out the car window:

There were crosses and memorials etched into the sides of mountains all over the island. I thought of them as Forrest honked the horn while we rounded a hairpin bend to warn any oncoming traffic not to crash into us.

Not a lot of signs in St. Lucia. Very few street signs, a handful of speed limit signs. I think the Hairpin Bend signs were among the most common of all.

One of our favorite signs. Wonder why they can't rent out that house???

And here's a few shots of the biggest city in St. Lucia, Castries, where the cruise ships come in to port. We were only 10 minutes or so outside of Castries and mostly drove through it, but did spend one day going to the local fruit market and visiting the maze of booths set up to sell souvenirs to the cruise ship passengers:

Darrin and Katie checking out the papayas. My favorite local fruit were the guavas -- you eat them rind and all.

Some local fishing boats in the bay.

A cruise ship docked in the bay. Every day there was at least one new ship, and this one was on the smaller side.

And that's enough for today. Tomorrow I'll delve into the flora and the fauna, the ocean and the flowers, the mountains and the lizards. All that beautiful stuff. 

Ch Ch Ch Ch Chaaanges

**So the new blog design was bugging me, mainly because I need my Peeps link to work more than anyone else does. Wasn't too hard to redo this (although some of the fonts are different.) That was a fun little experiment, wasn't it?**


So the blog's different, yes? I decided to try the new "dynamic" blog that Blogger's touting, and I like the look of it. Only problem is it won't import a bunch of my gadgets. Many of you are probably most concerned about losing my "peeps I pop in on" gadget on the sidebar because you use it to navigate around to other people's blogs (or maybe just my mom does?). The good news is that it really is here -- there are rectangles on the far right side, and if you hover over them, the peeps pop up. The bad news is that I've lost the ability to have the newest post show up; you're going to have to click on it and go check for yourself. Hopefully I'll be able to install that function again soon (they're working on expanding their gadgets) but until then, we're kinda stuck because I lost my old template. Whoopsie! But isn't the green pretty? I like the clean look of the layout too. And I really love being able to see more past posts. You can also go to the right hand side, click on "magazine," and a whole bunch of other blog views are available, if you don't like this one. Check it out.

Speaking of blogging, some of you (or, again, maybe just my mom?) have noticed that I haven't updated my blog quite as often. To be honest, I'm getting a little blog fatigued. Although I still plan to update my blog regularly, it will probably be every 2-4 weeks or so, instead of once a week. (And my three regular readers gasp in dismay! :-O). But now I don't have to feel guilty every time I see a two-week-old picture staring back at me. Right? So that's a good thing.

Now onto real-life stuff. Today is a gorgeous spring day (even though it's not really spring, oh no). The sun is shining, the little kids are out running around in the backyard. See?

Wyatt the Poser saw I had a camera

We're even bbqing for dinner. I did make the mistake of walking outside without my shoes on to light the charcoal and ruined my left sock. Sunk straight down in the mushy muck that is our back lawn. Appearances can be deceiving.

But it makes sense because a little over a week ago, this is what Wyatt was doing in the back yard:

Wyatt and his good friend Max

The kids have been busy with all sorts of things. The trimester just ended, and Ethan and Elise were especially busy with tests and projects. I helped Elise write a bill for her civics class -- it was a tough assignment, I'll tell you what -- and I just found out that "she" (okay, we?) got a B. Her civics teacher drives me a little batty. Luckily she's only in the 8th grade, so her report card doesn't matter nearly as much as it will six short months, so I'm just releasing that B into the universe of ridiculous grading. Elise has also been busy with play rehearsals after school every day and preparing to become a 14 year old almost-woman the end of this week. Oh, and she got bangs!

I just made her pose for this pic, even though she didn't want to. But this post needed her smiling face, and I also needed the opportunity to type, "She bangs! She bangs!' (In our old ward, there was a middle aged woman with the last name Vang, and Forrest would always sing "She Vangs, she Vangs!" under his breath when she'd walk by, just to try and make me crack up. It still makes me crack up, just thinking about it, actually.)

Along with Ethan's busy school schedule, he's been speeching it up. He's placed a few times, most recently earning second place in creative expression. Here he is wearing a stoic expression, holding his medal:

Creative expressionist by day, hit man by night

And just for kicks, here's a commercial he made for his English class. He said the "Thanks, Obama" line got the most laughs:

Jonas has been busy too. His Battle of the Books team from last year reunited: Revenge of the Nerd Herd was a force to be reckoned with, but a group of 5th grade girls barely edged them out for the class championship.

Only socially confident children can nerd it up so unselfconsciously

The traditional nerd herd pyramid

You can't see the poster very well -- I should have taken a picture -- but it included flying sea turtles.

He had a pretty good time on his academic triathlon team, too, even though they got handily trounced by the 6th grade teams they were required to compete against:

My only Academic Triathlon picture. Not very compelling, I realize, but it's better than nothing!

And Wyatt's just been hanging with his mom, chillin' like a 5 year old. The other day he took my camera and went around the house, taking pictures of whatever piqued his interest. So here's a photo essay, by Wyatt Dean:

Look at the proportions! A truly symmetrical shot.

Wyatt's meditations on the jarring juxtaposition of "play life" with "adult spaces" in the 5-year-old universe

This particular shot says something about the human condition, I'm sure of it.

Actually kind of pretty

And a little haunting, wouldn't you say?

Then he turns the camera sideways and takes a blurry picture of his mother.

So I took one of him:

What a kid! And a great way to end this post. We have a bunch o birthdays and a fun trip coming up, so stay tuned. For at least 2-4 weeks. :-)