1st & 2nd day blogs we hadn't been able to upload yet

4-23-09 9:30 pm. Hi everyone, we wanted to update our blog with our first day adventures. Well the Governors Harbour airport is very small (by very small I mean the 19 seat aircraft we were on filled up the arrival room of the airport). We walked out of the airport and there were several men sitting around the dirt road that was the front of the airport. The first person we saw asked who we were looking for. The care taker for the home is Israel Johnson. As soon as I said "Israel" he pointed out the guy sitting on a bench.

Israel is one incredibly nice person, he is also who we rented our car from. (1990 cutlass supreme, with 164000 miles that kind of has reverse. Sometimes you have to talk it into going into it.). The plus side of this is, it was cheap to rent and the roads are pretty bad and somewhat overgrown so we don’t really have to worry about scratching up the car going through the brush.

We went to town to get groceries, and paid $5.68 for a half gallon of milk. It’s a good thing we didn’t pack the cereal! A case of Coors light is $45, chips were anywhere between $3.80 and $6.00 a bag. Wow!!

The home is amazing!!! We are about 100 yards inland of the Atlantic ocean beach with nothing between us and the water. The stars are brighter than I’ve ever seen. The first time I walked out and looked up at night the big dipper was straight above. Wow! If it was any brighter it would have been little moons! When we went to the beach in front of our house we walked south about 50 yards and found a fairly fresh racing triamaran wreck. 2 of the hulls were very intact and one was demolished all over the beach. There are lots of snails and spiral shells alive on the rock on the beach. (Grant, I got you one of these shells, I should find lots more buddy.) I was inspecting some seaweed and out popped a beach rat!! Needless to say I moved very quickly! Speaking of little critters, Kristi moved a kitchen chair shortly after we got here and there was a baby lizard (gecko) under the leg. It was only about an 1 ¼" long.

Here’s the part I feel really silly about. The water for the house is all rain water which is collected in a cistern (a big tank, Grant) under the house. Kristi called me into the bedroom in the afternoon and asked me to listen to something. When I got there was no noise. Later she heard it again, and I did too. It sounded like a cat in the basement of the house, which is locked by the way. To make a long story short we called the Israel, the caretaker, out to the house at 9:15 at night and were told that it was frogs. Apparently frogs are considered a sign of a healthy cistern. We later found the note that the owner left informing us of this. Needless to say Israel is going to get a bit of an extra tip when we leave. Well we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow (4-24-09) so its time for me to go to bed. See you all soon.

Scott/Daddy

4-24-09, 7:36 am - Hi From Kristi! Mom - this house is great! It has so much wind/breeze blowing through we don’t even need the a/c (even in the middle of the day)! It faces east, so we’ll we get to see sunrises instead of sunsets. We are leaving at 11am to drive north to the dive shop. We need to be there by 1pm today. Appartently it takes an hour to get there. We thought if we give ourselves two hours we could make a few stops along the way. We will do two dives from the boat today. Scott heard about the "Friday night fish fry" in downtown (one stop light) Governor’s Harbour. So we are going to check that out later tonight. We will make more posts tomorrow! Kristi

2nd day blog -

4-24-09 9:38 pm Today was a good day. We woke up with the sunrise, it is amazing how quick it comes up here. We learned a lot about the island, and we actually traveled about half of it, going from Governors Harbour to the northern part where we got a ferry to Harbour Island. The ferry was more of a small boat and less ferry, but it was kind of cool to get on it, especially in this chop we’re having. Kristi did fine with the chop by the way. It is incredibly windy and the waves coming in off the Atlantic are huge (maybe not by Sam’s standards, living near the Pacific, but they were big waves for the Caribbean.) Surfers beach was averaging 6’ waves I think. Unfortunately the waves and wind disrupted our dive plans.

We went to a protected spot in a lagoon where I did my check out dives, that was only about 10’ deep. Unfortunately Kristi didn’t dive because it would have been old hat for her. Thankfully the owner of the dive shop told her and gave her the option to dive, snorkel or just ride on the boat. She decided to snorkel at the 2^{nd place. They took me to two sites, the first she didn’t even get in. I was doing my first check out here. It was decent but there were three kids (from Martha’s Vineyard. Harbour Island is pretty much a playground for the rich and famous.) who were doing a discover scuba tour. They were bumping into the coral and kicking up sand the whole time so the visability was pretty bad. The good news of that is I stayed close to the dive master and he knew how to find some neat fish on the coral heads and reefs. Sorry Grant no sharks yet. I did see 3 stingrays, 2 lionfish, many grouper, parrotfish, wrasse, triggers and lots of other neat reef fish, anemone, and corals. There are lots of little lizards here Grant, and I even video taped one for you today, and I got you some neat shells at surfers beach too.}

We still haven’t figured out how to get the blog working, we didn’t have time to make it back to the Library where the internet is tonight. The diving was done 40 miles north of where we stay so on the way back we made some interesting stops. We stopped in Gregory Town and had a cheeseburger at the bakery. (Yes I said the bakery! The buns were great!) Met some nice locals there too. Dr Seabreeze who is the main musician at Elvinas was great as was the owners husband, Chicken Ed from New Orleans. (I had read about these people before we left. We then headed back toward Gov. Harb. Along the way we stopped at surfers beach and Rainbow bay. There was a friendly Austrian man doing some fly fishing there and the view of the Caribbean was beautiful. He told us he had been about 20 miles south of us today and saw 4 manta rays swim right by him when he was standing in waist deep water. Hopefully we’ll get to experience this too! We had hoped to make it to the Friday night fish fry in Gov Harbour but were just too tired so we came to our place and made a quick dinner.

Well its getting late and we are both exhausted so it’s time to go to bed so we can catch the sunrise tomorrow. Hope everyone is well, take care.

Daddy/Scott

4-25-09 7:12 am (from Kristi)

Yesterday was really fun!! Even though I didn’t get to dive, it was still nice to go out on the boat, get some sun and go swimming. After Scott was done with his 2nd really shallow test dive we went snorkeling for about 45 minutes. While we were driving back south to the house we found a couple of really great beaches that we will definitely need to go back to before we leave. We stopped for a little while, but we were tired from running around all over the island for 8+ hours and were ready to head back! Right now I’m listening to the wind whip around the house off of the Atlantic and make squealing noises as it gets through the louvered windows. No sunrise today, just a few clouds off in the distance. You can see where the rain is hitting the water way out on the horizon. It’s a good thing it’s so windy, hopefully the clouds will blow out of here soon. The dive shop told us to call them tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon to check in and see how the wind forecast is for Monday. The boat captain told us yesterday we would most likely be able to do some more diving on either Monday or Tuesday. Well I’m going to enter our restaurant (the kitchen) and see what we can make for breakfast. After that I’m going to check on Scott and be sure he’s alive. There hasn’t been much movement from him for about 10 hours now. I’m guessing that he slept well! Hopefully we can figure out what the deal is with Scott’s laptop not working too well when we get to the library to use their internet connection. We do all of this typing at our house and then the intention was to just copy and paste what we had typed into the blog. Every time we tried to use the copy/paste commands while on the internet at the library yesterday it restarted the internet. So we’ll see how it goes today (we thought of a different way to try it). We will also try to post a couple of pictures from yesterday. As for the videos, we have taken a lot. Scott’ job on vacation is to be the "head video producer and narrator" for our videos. However I did take a couple yesterday and I know how to operate the video camera now! It’s great!! So if we can’t figure out a way to get the YouTube video links into the blog we will try emailing them to you. Hopefully that will work. Grant - I took some neat pictures of fish for you yesterday. We will try to email one of those pictures today too. Mom & dad - please kiss the dogs on the nose for me (just kidding). I’m sure Daisy has lost 5 pounds from mom walking her three times a day!! Talk to you soon! Kristi