Sunrise!

Strays...

You have to be careful about strays following you home, but what can you really do? Pretty much just have to feed them and give them a good home... especially when they're made completely from uni-directional carbon fiber.

USVI Homeward Bound

The week has gone by pretty quickly and, as usual, I've completely lost track of time and may have been here for two days or two months and I wouldn't know any different. We've seen lots of stuff, done lots of things and spent time with great friends. Thanks Nathan and Sarah for planning this!

As if to send us off with a bang, there is this fantastic sunrise just blazing away up there.

We rode the car barge back to St. Thomas, this time during the day.

Hanging out in the terminal area after finishing up security and customs. There is one large room for about eight terminals. It's the best one I've ever been in - glass all the way around and you are staring right at the runway with enough activity for entertainment.

There may not be snow but it will be Christmas soon. 

Our flight is called up and we head past the ticket kiosk and out the door. That's the plane we'll be flying on, right outside the windows there.

One last look around as we must say farewell to this place. The beauty here is immense and it was hard to keep from going numb and just getting used to it right away. I'm hoping to take away a little of the way of life locals live, where we maybe don't need to be quite so busy all the time. A stop and smell the roses sort of thing?

Ice Rain

I don't remember which day this was but we got some pretty decent ice rain about a week ago. There was at least an eighth inch on everything, with thicker spots. It did warm up pretty quick so it wasn't a total disaster.

After determining that it was too much work to clean the car off when it would simply melt on its own anyway, we walked to the grocery store for some provisions.

The ground and cement was 100% ice covered and would have been a total deathtrap without YakTrax.

This tree had fallen over recently but it may not have been ice related as I don't see the ice being all that heavy.

Have to stay warm out there!

USVI Day 9 (Videos added)

It's our last full day here so we all got up early to catch a sunrise. There was a nice little road which went nearly to the water and then a somewhat (in the dark anyway) sketchy path which wound out onto a small peninsula which offered a great panoramic view.

After patient waiting, we start to get some good light on the horizon. 

I'm still slightly perplexed by the light and clouds here. Things were all setup to absolutely explode but this was about the best of it. No problem, it was still a beautiful morning and getting to sit outside before dark to watch the day start was extra recharging. 

Out on the peninsula, we saw a couple of these large caterpillars.

Hiking back down, I saw soo many places where I should have filled my feet with needles on the way up but I missed them all - only caught two on the way down. 

Today we snorkeled Little Lamshier Bay. This place was great! It had lots of larger creatures such as rays, turtles, and a good size nurse shark. The reef sort of made a C shape and connected to another second, nearby bay. I've got some videos for this that I'll add later.

More Jeeps...lots of Jeeps.

Here are some of the stairs we take up and down every time we leave the house. What you see here is about 3/4 of the trip down to the main boardwalk path, which then has another flight up to the house. 

Here's the kitchen/dining area of the house. 

It doesn't really have windows - just tilting slats with bug screening. It was pretty fun living with this sort of setup. You can always see outside and the breeze blows through most of the time. 

Not a bad view from the pool either! We didn't spend a lot of time in here but it was a nice change once in a while.

Toward evening, we hiked out to Drunk Bay. This bay is the last part of the island facing toward Africa (I believe?) so the waves coming in here are carrying almost anything dropped into the ocean offshore. We had some information indicating that people build statues out of the refuse on the beach. 

We met some of the local donkeys as we arrived at the first beach on the route. They were heading back up toward the road.

I did not really envision the statues looking like this. They are made mostly of the dead coral, though some incorporate sea junk for accessories.

It was also somewhat creepy that they were everwhere. 

The ocean here was far more violent that anywhere else we've been so far. Big waves coming in pretty quickly. Combined with the stiff breeze and ominous sky, it was a powerful place to stand a while and soak it in.

We hiked back out around Salt Pond.

Rare animal sighting - there was a miniature(?) white-tail deer lurking in the bushes. It is possibly a bush-deer.

Iowa Bike Summit

Corrine, Cody and I went to the Iowa Bike Summit in Des Moines. This is a two day event with the first day focusing on bike infrastructure development/engineering as well as community development. The second day is an product/event expo. 

There was in fact a bacon booth! This was extremely good stuff too - they did compete at BaconFest so there's that...

Corrine doing a mini test-ride on a Foundry 29'er

Here's' a SuperSix Evo. It is more or less the lightest frameset on the planet right now. The Cannondale regional rep. was there and informed us that this is the "heavy" version. There's a lighter version which doesn't have decals or paint. 

Crank for SRAM's new XX1 group, using a single front chain-ring.

New SRM power-meter. These things are ultra-cool. There's a set of strain-gauges setup between the chain-ring and crank arm. The rep. told us that the new ones are now able to determine power output separately between right leg and left leg as well!

My car also changed color from black to white for a day. Weird?