Dave and I (Jo) met at the Chicago Midway airport at 7:00 AM. I had driven from Madison Wisconsin and was working on just a couple hours of sleep. We were going to fly to the British Virgin Islands and see for the first time the only catamaran that we found that met our budget.
After an uneventfully flight we reach our destination ready for a good night sleep before the busy day ahead of us. It was about 3:00 PM and we had a couple hours of daylight to find our campsite.
You know you are in the Caribbean when the goats and chickens run freely.
We go to pick up our luggage and sure enough they lost one of our pieces. We are experienced travelers so we only check in the nonessentials. "So Dave what did they loose? The tent, Dave, they lost the tent?! Great..."
With no place to go we rely on our instincts and ask where the nearest bar is. We walk for about a mile through a dirt road and sure enough we find the "Loose Mongoose" A small bar on the beach front of a very nice harbor. We figure out what's the special and proceed to drink some cold ones.
It is now sunset and the Loose Mongoose is getting ready to serve it's famous barbecue dinner. At this point Dave and I had already decided that tent or no tent we would not go searching for the campground at night. Dave walks back to the airport to check if the tent came in. I sit at the beach front looking over our bags. Dave gets back and so does the tent and dinner is served. Life is good!
Dinner was great and two singers start setting up their equipment. They start singing an incredible range of songs and the crowd is quite happy to tap their feet and engage in conversation.We have a couple more beers to help digestion. The music sounds better as time goes on.
As I usually ask Dave when I 'm tired and sleep deprived.... "Dave I think we can take this party up a notch." Soon we zero into some innocent bystanders and convince them to start dancing with us. And that was all it took. We now had a party started!
Somewhere that night, someone asked us where we were staying. As we said the beach looked very promising. They offered us a spot on their boat. Little did we know how lucky we were. We got top accommodations for night, and most importantly we had met exactly the kind of people that make cruising so much fun. Actually as we pull up to the boat a slight rain started to come down and we were just happy to have a little something over our heads.
Breakfast served. A little local knowledge on the bus system and our hosts send us off to our 1st day of boat shopping.
More to follow...
Jo
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