vacationer

my decision to take a trip to tortola was made while i was helplessly intoxicated after thanksgiving dinner. it was almost like i took a thousandth gulp of my white wine, looked away for a moment, and a real vacation landed in my lap, said "take me." now, i'm so glad that the vacation fairies were watching out for me that night.

this was the kind of vacation where you opt to take your big suitcase and pack more than one bathing suit and snorkeling gear. it was one where you stay for a week and actually unpack. even better, tortola is a place where you get no cell reception and it's just strange enough for the foreign-ness to be invigorating, but not so remote that it's a concern. being a beach baby is great on any beach for a week, but this was so much more than that. here are some highlights.

the roads were terrifyingly, vertigo-inducing steep. and not just steep in the normal up-and-down way, but they also were steep sideways, if you can imagine. the car we rented? a sentra. just drive on the left and try not to roll the car off into the ocean.

there was a music festival, mostly hip hop and reggae, on our beach the last two nights of our stay. wyclef played saturday and, although i was in bed by the time he went on, i could hear him playing while lying in my bed.

my favorite beach day was the day we took the sentra offroading to a secluded beach called smuggler's cove. the road there was not impassible but definitely undeveloped and rough. we were almost the only people on the beach that day and found it to provide the best snorkeling on the island. the best part, though, was patricia and esther, two sisters who camp out at smuggler's cove every day with their coolers and miniature charcoal grill and serve folks grilled chicken and frozen rum drinks and beer. they had to use a generator to run the blender for the frozen drinks!

a real vacation. worth every penny, every hour of annual leave used. next year we're sailing BVI.