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I realize that I'm terrible at finishing up a travel journal and closing the book on it. There weren't any great epiphanies from our travels to the Virgin Islands. We went out to the far reaches and spent time with people who had enough time, who made time, and who had arranged their lives to escape whatever the rest of us are running towards or away from. The last thing Dean said to me as we moved the bags from the house to the car was that 10 days was too short, it was almost too short to bother. And I wonder if the month in Italy last year spoiled us for good, or the fact that we had taken 3 trips outside the mainland US in a little over a year had made us restless for more travel. But we were time constrained this time. I had a new job waiting for me. Dean had a software release that needed to be finished. (And they punished him terribly at work for taking the time off. It was almost Thanksgiving before he wasn't working nights and weekends to appease them.)
You can't really call it an epiphany to say that Dean and I and everyone else in Silicon Valley work too hard. But I think I discovered in St. John that I'm not ready to throw it all in and spend the rest of my life drifting around the big wide Caribbean in a tiny white dot of sailboat. I think that if I did that I would become invisible. If I wrote at all, it would be this thick salt encrusted, curled page manuscript that someone would publish after my death like a modern day Emily Dickinson. And even then Dean have to heave the manuscript over the side in a slightly charred life raft with the word "rosebud" stenciled on the side so it would wash up on the sand somewhere and become an unsolved mystery, hinting at evidence of the supernatural before anyone would get really interested in it.
Our last day on St. John was as quiet and low-key as the other days that proceeded it. We had coffee and raisin-apple-cinnamon toast with the TV on that was just starting to hint that the election day hadn't gone as smoothly as planned. We took a drive to the Annaberg sugar mill ruins where we read each other little quips about the terrible lives of slaves. Slaves only had a 3 year life expectance after reaching the island from Africa and they didn't even get fed by the slave owners. They were given 1 day off a week to farm or fish or do whatever they had to do to collect food for the next 6 days of very hard physical labor. They beat them and whipped them and worked them 15 hour days and they didn't feed them. And to add insult to injury, most of the slave owners didn't even live on St. John. It was too rocky and remote and uncivilized there. So, they were beaten, whipped, and not fed by hired hands.
I guess in our modern times, the hired hands have been replaced by middle management.
We took the ferry back to St. Thomas, caught a taxis to the airport. The driver managed to squeeze 7 passengers and their luggage into a van with only 5 seats.
The flight back was completely uneventful, except that they had made a big deal about being at the airport 2 hours before the flight because you clear US customs in St. Thomas before you board the plane. But clearing customs took about 5 minutes and then we had hours to sit there and watch CNN which was going on about this election thing and how no one was president elect. I figured they'd have it all straightened out by Monday when I headed off to my first day of work at the new place. It was almost midnight, cold, rainy, and dark, when we got off the plane in San Francisco and had to wander around outside for a bit before we found the van we'd hired to take us home. Well, I think it was just me wandering around, confused after so many hours in transit. Dean knew where we were headed. Good man, Dean. I wouldn't go anywhere without him.
So, we were home again in California. Believe it or not, I always miss it when I'm gone. And to quote Robert Louis Stevenson in his poem "Requiem":
Here he lies where he longs to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Happy trails, LeeAnn and Dean.
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