18. The Journey Home (Mick)

And so to the last day, which I’ll keep short.

It started early, as we had to be up before 4 to catch a small charter boat from Virgin Gorda to Beef Island. Despite the early start this was pretty cool – the day was just beginning to break as we set off, and James our skipper spent the whole trip telling us about the deep waves that we were seeing from Hurricane Bill (which explained the murky water yesterday), the annual cycle of bird and turtle migrations, the physical capacity constraints on air travel in the BVI, his life history and a number of other interesting topics. Clare has a theory on the type of person that talks like this, but I won’t repeat it here for fear of getting flamed.

We got to the airport on time, and LIAT did a good job getting us and our baggage to Antigua via a scheduled stop at St Maartens. I don’t know much about that island but it looks like a Caribbean Benidorm, an instant reminder of just how unspoilt the BVI are. We had a lonnnnng stopover in Antigua before our flight home so just like the outbound journey we got to know the departure lounge very well. Still it did at least give Liam to update his Facebook status for the rest of the day.

Thats it really - the plan was delayed two hours but actually even that worked out ok, as most of that translated into extra sleeping time as we landed just after 7am rather than the 5:30am scheduled time.