A huge caterpillar, eating away on leaves by Jean-Jacques gate
We ate breakfast over at Thierry and Brigitte's bungalow. I felt a bit dizzy and had a mild stomach ache. I hoped that I had not picked up what Gaetan and Thierry had the other day. I took two Advils. Things got a bit better after breakfast so I decided to not kill a good day by sleeping it away. Erik also complained about feeling a bit "weird" and needing to go to the bathroom.
A huge caterpillar, eating away on leaves by Jean-Jacques
gate
Lilly called the doctor and setup an appointment for getting a medial exam done for her diving. She talked to Sophy about Isabella's ears and got some tablets that would help cure/supress the effects of her mild ear infection. The hope was that she would be good by the time we were to dive again next Tuesday.
This morning the plan was to head out to St Francois and its very nice southern beach. Thierry and Brigitte spent part of their day there yesterday and Brigitte was less interested in going out again, this soon. But she teamed up with Sophy and my dad and went off to visit the Mangrove areas in the north of Grande Terre. That is part of the beauty of going down with a larger group - you can setup smaller activity groups each day. So we bundled up two cars for our part of the trip, which included all the kids, myself, Lilly, Thierry and Naveed.
It took a little bit longer than expected to get to St Francois because of traffic. We stopped along the way on a beach just before St Anne. It was a local beach and it was not maintained (lots of debris on it). But it appeared to offer very good wind surfing opportunities. There was even a burned out car next to the beach which some of the kids found to be very amusing. There were a few locals playing on the beach and we could see one fisherman throwing nets in waist high water. A bit further out a few locals were diving with mask. I guess that they were trying to fish something.
Naveed showing off his new camera strap. Somewhat
"spartan".
Once we arrived in St Francois we lucked out and got a table with overhead cover as we drove the car into the parking. We sent the kids off to grab it before someone else did. It offered shade which some of us needed. We put sun protection lotion on everyone, using SPFs such as 15, 30 and 45. We wanted to be able to stay here for most of the day without being toasted. It was about 11:30 by the time the kids could run down to the water and that some of us adults could go out and do some snorkling.
A table in the shade at the beach in St Francois
I went out snorkling with Thierry and we met Isabella out there who was already swimming around. She does not want to use a snorkel and instead just takes air into her lungs and holds it. She often dives down towards the bottom, to be able to see things a bit better. There was lots of fish to see. Many different colors and sizes. We even saw a school of some 50 white fish very near us. As we moved towards the shore, I wanted to have Isabella practice diving without mask a few times so that she would become a bit more prepared for the diving exercises she would be subjected to in a few days. She could not bring herself to do it. She did one dive, to pick up her mask from the bottom, with her eyes closed. She immediately rubbed her eyes real hard and they started to itch, of course. When I asked her to dive with open eyes, she gradually got more and more upset about her itching eyes but did not want to dive down and pick up her mask. Sigh. That does not bode well for some of the exercises she is going to be subjected to!
Erik playing in the sand on the beach
The boys were down at the shore, playing in the waves and in the sand. Gaetan swam with his blue surf board and Erik with our inflated red matress. They appeared to have a good time. It was hard to get Erik to come up for lunch.
Getting excellent lunch at the beach from a local
stand.
We had decided to buy lunch by the beach. With the nice table and cover we had, we thought about just getting the food over to our table and eat there instead of by the restaurant's tables. It took almost one hour to get the food prepared for us. These little vans that do the job do not have a big kitchen and there is only one person working in it. We finally got our things around 2 o'clock. But the wait was well worth it. The food was excellent. The kids got fried chicken and french fries, with vegetables. We also ordered a few sodas and ended up with a hodge podge of brands because they did not have a whole lot of any particular brand. We got a Caribbean sea plate. It was excellent, too. The adults also shared a plate of chicken and cous-cous. Very good. All the kids ate.
Isabella and Morgane posing at the beach (same place as last
year)
Towards the afternoon some of us stayed at the table to read books. Some went out a did some more snorkling. Barry and Susan showed up and joined us. Few of us got burned today because we had creamed ourselves quite a bit. That was nice. By about 4:30, dad, Sophy and Brigitte joined us. They had also had a good time on their excursion. A little while later we started to pack up because Lilly wanted to stop by at the store to get some more supplies. We took the three boys in the car. The rest of the people stayed behind, but Thierry planned to be back at the bungalows no later than 6:30 to meet our mountain guide. When Lilly came out of Continent (which is about to be renamed to Carrefour) she remarked that even the ladies at the cash registers were dressed in festive clothes as the carnival is approaching.
We got back to the bungalows at 6:30 and I quickly hooked up with Thierry. No guide, but the guide has said that he'd be there between 6:30 and 9:00 so there was no reason to be alarmed. We started preparing dinner while we asked the kids to do their journals. We wanted to heat up the leftover soup from last night. Brigitte spent some time digging out tons of bones and other un-eatable things from the bottom of the big pot. It took a while to heat it. We also wanted to consume some of the other "leftovers" we had accumulated. We ate up at the communal bungalow. Very nice. Susan, Naveed and Barry had reserved a place at a restaurant so they were out for dinner.
As 9:00 approached, still no sign of the guide. We started talking about calling him, but as we spoke he appeared from the darkness surrounding the bungalow. He said he had bad news. The second guide he had counted on using for the hike had not contacted him, as planned. David had called the other guide and left several messages but no news back from him yet. Given the size of the group, David did not feel comfortable taking on the whole group all by himself, especially if we were going to break off more experienced hikers at one point for a wider loop. He did not like leaving the less experienced hikers by themselves. We decided to wait calling off the organized hike until 8:30 tomorrow morning. After David left, we talked about the news and we were a bit concerned about the lack of organization on the part of David. We were also speculating that the Cernival may have had a higher priority for him and his friends. Oh, well. We spent a few more minutes squaring away our expense balance so that we could start fresh tomorrow. We went to bed around 11 o'clock.