Irie (EYE-ree)—to be at total peace with your current state of being. The way you feel when you have no worries. (Jamaican)
The small-town paraders and bystanders were more than irie long before the procession began just before noon. This is a big deal in Christiansted. Everyone knows this isn’t the right day, but we’re on an island, so what the hey!
Continue reading “Kiss Me, I’m Irie!–St. Patrick’s Day on St. Croix”
A mile south of our camp, we found a fallen sign next to a broken road leading uphill and west: Scenic Route. Our now-crumpled map, provided free at the airport days earlier by hopeful advertisers, 
echoed the invitation: Scenic Route. Our eyes met, questioned, then agreed. A right turn, and we were adventure-borne.
In minutes the winding pockmarks became new macadam, but our progress remained slow until we passed the yellow-flagged, plant-eating crew manning machines that chewed shoulder grass, weeds, and three-inch thick branches like Skoal. Continue reading “Lost! (Episode 4: St. Croix)”
Christiansted, at 3,000, the larger of St. Croix‘s two towns, is just what one would expect a Caribbean tourist town to be: shops, restaurants, water sports, bars, and realtors. When cruise ships dock at St. Croix’s only non-industrial, deep-water port in Frederiksted, passengers are almost always immediately taxied or bused to the more attractive, more upscale, more commercial, Cristiansted. According to my walking-around, noonish census, visible tourists here outnumber visible Crucians 2-1. Continue reading “St. Croix–Christiansted and Points East”
Cooled by early morning trade winds, we sunblocked, took an early morning walk on our condo’s north shore beach, then drove west through St. Croix’s rain forest (left-lane driving is significantly less stressful in daylight) to Frederiksted, population 830, the smaller of the island’s two towns. Built around Fort Frederik in the mid-18th century, the town was originally, and still is, just seven streets by seven streets…and we walked most of them, passing many locals (Crucians) and spotting only five possible tourists. Continue reading “St. Croix–Frederiksted”
It took us eleven hours to connect from SFO to STX.
SFO—We will be gone eight days.
Tip #1: After checking to make certain that the shuttle schedule meshes with your flight plans, stay overnight at lodging near the airport if you have a 6:30 a.m. flight.
Tip #2: Choose a motel (we picked Red Roof Inn) that will let you park your car for the entire length of your trip. Their parking fees are almost always less than airport lots.
The total cost of lodging plus pre-paid parking was only two-thirds of what parking nearer the airport would have cost…plus, we did not Continue reading “East to St. Croix”
This morning’s devastating earthquake in Chile (8.8 on the Richter scale) had an energy equivalent of approximately 15.8 gigatons of TNT (31,600,000,000,000 lbs). To put that in perspective, it is about as much energy as would be released by 300 of the largest thermonuclear bombs ever built (the USSR’s Tsar Bomba, detonated in Novaya Zemlya in 1961).
The largest earthquake ever recorded was the 9.5 magnitude 1960 Valdivia earthquake, also in Chile.
Just to put the Great Chilean Earthquake (an alternate name for the Valdivia quake) in its perspective, scientists estimate that the Yucatán Peninsula bolide (meteor) impact that created the Chicxulub crater 65 million years ago and led to mass extinction of the dinosaurs and other species had the energy of almost 600 Valdivia earthquakes.