13. Ana passes us by

There are two reasons why this is the "off season" in the British Virgin Islands.

One is that people like coming here when it is cold at home, so peak season starts with Thanksgiving in the US and runs through to the end of spring in the UK. The other is that it is hurricane season (which by the way led to some poorly-informed arguments about pronunciation and etymology , but lets not go there).

Its been pretty quiet while we've been here, but as Tropical Storm Ana became the first named storm of the season we saw how the storms become a part of everyday conversation, and noticed they were picked up a couple of times at mass on Sunday. In the end the BVI were very lucky, the storm swung south and bypassed us, but we did get really strong howling winds and lashing rain all through Sunday night. Monday morning was cloudy and still quite windy so we got a bit nostalgic for Mayo and went for an old-skool drive-around-in-the-rain kind of day.

"Just like Mayo" has actually been a recurring quote through this holiday and while its usually delivered in the smart-Alec sense, referring to the temperature of the sea or the heat of the sun, there is quite often an element of truth in it. Perhaps that's one reason we like Virgin Gorda so much, the rough landscape, the hills (once you get away from The Valley), the often-empty long clean beaches and the Atlantic crashing in.

Of course, not everyone is all that nostalgic about long drives in the rain, use your powers of deduction to see if you can work out which member of the family stayed in the car reading Harry Potter every time we stopped to admire the view...

When I say long drive, thats a relative term as the island is only ten miles long and two across at its widest, and the roads don't reach all the way to the north end. This is the fashionable North Sound, much of it only reachable by boat, and very big with the yachting crowd. We drove as far as Gun Creek, which we'd been told was the only resort that was still open. In fact everywhere was shut so we headed over to Leverick Bay passing the local jail on the way. Leverick was open, that is at least the resort was. Like the resort at Long Bay beach, this had the pros and cons of globalisation - on the down side you could be eating in any bar restaurant in the US, on the plus side it was actually open and the chips were terrific. You'll not be surprised to hear that we swallowed our ideals almost as quickly as we swallowed our Painkillers. It was striking though just how quiet it was, there seemed to be only about a dozen other people in a resort geared up to cater for hundreds, so hurricanes or not, this is the time of year to come here.

After lunch we headed back home. The weather had started to lift as Ana receded so the views just got nicer and nicer. The plan was to spend the afternoon chilling out in the pool, but in the end the 20-mile round trip and the challenge of lunch proved to have worn some of us out ...