I have just returned from that land of pirate legends and cruise ships, the Caribbean. It was fabulous, of course. Most of it was, anyway. Our flight left LAX at 10:30 PM, stopping six hours and a showing of _Hidalgo_ later in JFK. I'd never been on the East Coast at all, and I was surprised by how humid and warm it was. I wish I'd gotten the chance to actually see a part of New York other than the airport (which amazingly looks exactly like the one in Los Angeles :-P), but we were soon on our way to the Cyril E. King airport of St. Thomas, one of the US Virgin Islands. And it was MUGGY. Fortunately, the breezes were nice and cool, making it bearable to an arid West Coaster like myself. After boring typical airport stuff, we all piled into our rented car, soon to discover that EVERY BLASTED PERSON on the island drives on the WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD. A sticker affixed to the front passenger airbag read, "KEEP LEFT," and in smaller letters, "BLOW HORN FREQUENTLY." Because, you know, all of the natives do. Whoever said Caribbeans (?) were laid-back never visited St. Thomas. If you don't blow your horn every couple of seconds, you just won't fit in.

After a harrowing drive out of the airport, through Charlotte Amalie (pronounced "ah-MAL-yah" and named after the wife of the Danish King Christian whose reign the island was claimed under), we arrived at our condo, where we stayed for the next five nights. It was a lovely place, and I highly recommend it to anyone visiting the island. The condo was called Crystal Cove, located at Sapphire Beach. Our unit was A-8, which the housekeeper told us was the best unit in the complex. I believe it. We had a nice little private balcony and a wonderful view of the ocean. The first full day we spent there was spent shopping. No sales tax! That second night (we barely managed to get our bags to the room before falling asleep the first night), we barbecued and ate outside on the balcony. As the sound of a band from a resort just down the beach drifted in, we got silly. I forget who started it, but by the end of the evening, we had invented a new dance craze called the "Booger," performed to the tune of the macarena. I shall spare you the details.

Mom was sick to her stomach the third day, so she and I just lounged around the condo while Dad and my brother went scuba-diving. We watched one guy on the beach who started out in a lounger, then stumble over to lay face down in the sand for an hour and a half. We started joking that he must be passed out from being drunk. Mom said something about him being DOA--Drunk on Arrival. I replied he was DOB--Drunk on Beach. After he had laid there a while, Mom said he was going to be BOB--Burnt on Beach. So we referred to him as Bob the rest of the day.

It rained later that day. There were only a couple of days that it didn't rain, and there were a couple of days where a "tropical wave" sent gallons of drops and huge wind gusts (I read in a local paper that a gust on St. Thomas had reached 39 mph, and on Puerto Rico had reached 60!). The humidity, to my surprise, didn't bother me like I had thought it would. I had a hard time sleeping at night because of the thick, still air, but most of the time it was fine.

The rest of our stay was spent mostly just hanging out, "chillaxing," as the housekeeper put it. On the next day, we left the condo and went to the Island Beachcomber hotel. We had made plans to spend the entire trip there, but they had rented the entire hotel to 160 volleyball players for the first six days of our stay. Mom and Dad honeymooned there 24 years ago and wanted to go back, so we spent the last two nights of our stay there. It was a blessing that those volleyball players had rented all the rooms. The place, which had been first-rate when my folks were there, was horribly run down. The first room they had us in was so small it was almost comical. Mom and Carson both got claustrophobic within seconds. Fortunately, the room they moved us to was adequate. It wasn't a terrible stay, but we were very glad we hadn't spent the entire trip there.

It was incredible to be immersed in a totally different culture. For example:
(1) Everyone seems to live at the poverty level.
(2) All around, there are shells of buildings that were ripped apart in the last major hurricane, because no one could afford to repair them.
(3) We discovered that the Caribbean people sure do love color! Apartments and houses were painted in colors to make a colorblind man shriek. My favorite was one two-story building, the bottom front of which was neon green and the sides and upper half were brilliant turquoise. AIEE MY POOR EYEBALLS. Pink, bright light blue, and orange are also popular colors.
(4)There is NO PARKING ANYWHERE AT ANY TIME EXCEPT FOR TAXIS. :-P
(5)Neat food! We ate conch; fried platain; "local stuffing," (which tastes like mashed yams mixed with raisins, but is really white mashed potatoes with tomato paste, nutmeg, a few other spices, and raisins. You eat it with fish and things. A bit sweet for me, but OK); fungi, pronounced "FOON-gee," and no, it has nothing to do with fungus. It is a bit like corn pone; a mix of cornmeal and pieces of okra, often with melted cheese on top. At least, I think it was cheese. :-o
(6) The water is SO CLEAR and WARM. The Pacific is always murky and frigid, at least in California. The difference was shocking. I counted six different shades of blue at one time, ranging from scintillating turquoise where the water is deep and the bottom sandy to nearly black where the reefs are. The beach the condo was on had a lot of reefs. Dad wanted me to go snorkeling, but I have this phobia about things in the water. (Those little electronic moving pool clearner things freak me out.) So we compromised. I put on a mask and snorkel and laid on top of an inflatable raft while he pushed me around. It was really neat to see the schools of fish and the different corals, though I got sunburnt on the backs of my legs from lying on my stomach. Sitting down was painful the rest of the trip.

We braved the streets of Charlotte Amalie a couple of times to go shopping. EGAD, there are some bad roads in them thar hills! Tortuous and steep (steep as in the car feels like it will tumble trunk-over-hood any second) in many places in town, the additional pleasures of potholes and irregular lines can be had when venturing into the countryside. However, other than the couple of times Dad drifted over to the right-hand side of the road without realizing and almost got us killed, it was a grand adventure. We took the main road to a dead end out in the middle of nowhere. We drove around residential areas, gawking at the horrendously-brightly-colored houses. We saw a lot of iguanas. They are everywhere! We must have seen several dozen during our stay. They sure are odd-looking creatures. The condo's housekeeper told us that a family who comes there every year always takes back six or eight baby iguanas (which I think is illegal) to raise and sell in the States. How do they sneak them past Customs? By braiding them--alive--into their daughters' hair! Once on the plane home, the girls go into the lavatory and unbraid the little creatures and put them in a tote bag with grass to eat. I think I will never be easy using an airplane bathroom again.

Speaking of hair braiding: Some women down there braid hair for money. Cornrows or whatever the batch of little braided tails are called. These ladies would come up to me and ask if I wanted my hair braided, only to recoil in horror when I turned around and they saw how long my hair was. 'Oh, sorry! That would take me all day!' they'd say. Not that I would let anyone touch my hair, but it was hilarious.

The flight back was uneventful for the most part. Instead of a two-hour layover in New York, as originally anticipated, we managed to squeeze into a flight that left an hour and a half earlier. This was great, we thought, because we'd get to LA at ten instead of midnight. However, what none of us realized until we were off the ground was that our luggage was on the other flight. So we got to wait in LAX for two hours. When FINALLY the other plane landed, we found that two of our four pieces of luggage had been opened by airport personnel. A notice in one bag said they had randomly selected this luggage to inspect for "forbidden items." It was a mess. One bag, a duffel containing all sorts of snack foods, had been run over by a truck to judge from the condition of the contents. The other duffel bag, full of Dad and Carson's scuba equipment, was torn apart. The top was open, stuff was sticking out, and a bin accompanying it held items they couldn't fit back in the bag. The zipper was completely missing. Since scuba gear isn't cheap, we had locked the bag. According to the notice, if they can't open the bag, they will "break the lock," and they are "extremely sorry but will not compensate for damages." Or some such rot. We were extremely glad the bag had been a cheap one.

I really don't understand the logic of such random searches. IMO, if you're going to do random searches, you might as well not do any.Who knows what you're missing? What are the odds of selecting the bag of a terrorist or other such person at random? Southwest Airlines' policy makes much more sense: They search EVERY bag, and they do it right in front of you so you can unlock it for them.

When we made it to the hotel, it was midnight-thirty. We stood in line (only in LA is there a line at a hotel desk at midnight!) for several minutes, then noticed the line wasn't moving. To make a long story not quite as long, the plumbing had gone sour in a major part of the building and most of the folks in line were bussed elsewhere for the night. We managed to grab a room, for which we were extremely grateful. It was 1:30 (4:30 Caribbean time) before we got to our room and collapsed.

Anyway, I've rambled on enough. As they say, it was fun to go, but it is nice to be home again.

La"One parting funny: A lot of men down there make a living driving taxis. They stand on street corners asking passerby if they need one. We, who had our own car, got so annoyed by this that my dad said he was going to start asking random people if they needed an accountant and my brother said he would help by asking if they needed a Boy Scout"Zorra