Day 71, Year 1: Just the Two of Us
Date: Tuesday, December 27, 2005, EST 1800
Weather: Partly Sunny and 83 degrees F
Location: Vieux Fort, St. Lucia

If you have been following our logs, you might have noticed that it is always 83 degrees F. Our thermometer is not broken. It is just always 83 degrees. Sometimes the days are mostly sunny and once in a while we have a day with many periods of drizzly rain, but the sun comes right back.

We are once again just two here on Windbird and it is a little lonely this evening. Heather, Jed, and Justin flew out of Vieux Fort on American Airlines at 1550 this afternoon. Mark and I went to the airport to see them off, but as they finally had to head through the gate for final departure, Mark and I came back to the boat and watched the plane take off from here. They left right on time and should be getting into Miami any time now, and then on to Boston by midnight. We had a really hard time letting them go today. We have had such a wonderful time together the past nine days and we wish we could just stow them away and keep them with us. We started our day today snorkeling around the anchorage and then headed across town to the beach for a little fun in the surf. Then it was time to head to the airport. We know they will visit us again as we continue our travels and we look forward to those times, but parting is never easy. But we all have wonderful memories of our time together in St. Lucia and St. Vincent, and we will just have to keep those pictures in our heads until we are together again.

When we went to the beach today, I was able to connect to the internet for the first time in more than a week. It is always so much fun to read the comments people have sent to the website and get e-mails that have not been sent to our ham e-mail account that we receive daily. Today was very special. We heard from Scott McPherson at New Hampshire Public Radio. His wife, Kelly, had twin boys on Christmas Eve. What a wonderful Christmas present! Scott and Kelly, we are so very happy for you. We got a wonderful “Twas the Day After Christmas” poem from our friends Detta and Tom Porat and their two children, Matthew and Sarah. Mark and I both heard from friends from work back in Concord and loved hearing the updates on what is happening there. And we had a few holiday messages from close friends and family. We find the e-mail communication to be such an important part of our lives these days. We love what we are doing, but we find that keeping connections with those back home to be a really important part of our days. Keep those e-mails coming.
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In the last nine days, we experienced such an array of people and places, and even though we took lots of pictures, I don’t feel they capture the essence of what we have seen. The pictures not taken include an old man high in the mountains in St. Vincent, sitting on his donkey with his bush knife tucked under his arm. Juxtapose that with the young man we saw in the same area sitting on his donkey listening to his Ipod. I have been very reluctant to take pictures of people and unfortunately, as we prepare to leave St. Lucia, I realize that it is the faces of the people that tell the story. When Justin gets home, he will post the pictures that we do have, but please understand that they tell only a bit of the story of the people here. I would have to spend a much longer period of time with the people here in order to really capture their way of life through photographs. Maybe that will be my next adventure.

051227 Day 71 Vieux Fort, St. Lucia