Moving to St. Croix

Ok – we moved here almost 2 years ago, and I have yet to post a single thing! Seriously, just getting here and everything that led up to that was so stressful that once we made it, I just wanted to enjoy it.

I looked back at some of my old posts (yes, from 3 years ago) and it’s so funny how my perspective of this island has changed after living here. Chad and I are so much more integrated into the community than we ever were in Dallas. It’s like a small town, and believe me, after growing up in a town with 1500 people, I know small towns. Sure, we have 50,000 people living on St. Croix, but you almost cannot go anywhere on this island without seeing someone you know – which I guess has benefits and drawbacks. You may not want to run into your loan officer after you just crawled out of bed and ran to the store to pick up milk, but on the other hand, if you really need help with something, chances are, you will know someone who can help you. Like when Chad broke his nose in a soccer game on a Sunday afternoon, we were on the phone with not one, but two plastic surgeons within thirty minutes. I wouldn’t have even begun to know how to contact one in Dallas.

Being involved in a small community has its other benefits. Reading my post “Running in the Virgin Islands,” I lamented the fact that there would not be any running programs here. Instead, I found a close-knit group to run and train with for the Chicago marathon last year, and I did better in that marathon than I did running with a large group in Dallas.

We’ve also become more involved here by giving of our time. I posted on “St. Croix Animal Rescue” and now I am on the Board for the shelter and Chad helped build their awesome new website. We even adopted the newest member of our family there because we fell in love with Gooch (and let’s be honest, he fell in love with us) the very first time that we volunteered at the shelter.

What else have we done? I am teaching yoga two days a week at Beeston Hill Fitness Center. (thanks for my incredible training, DYC!) Chad is playing soccer with Skills. (Soccer down here is not all like Dallas, or maybe I should say going to watch soccer here is not at all like Dallas.) I wish we could say that we spend every waking moment at the beach, but sadly, that is not the case.

I guess my point is that we have really invested a lot of time and energy into making St. Croix our home and it feels more like home to me than living in Dallas for 12 years ever did. Now if we could just actually build that home. More on that later . . .

Our first St. Croix Festival “Adult” Parade was a blast. We had a wonderful time and will try and have friends schedule their vacations around it in the future.

Here is a link to all the photos:

2009 St. Croix Festival Adult Parade

The moon has been close to full all of this week and with relatively minor cloud cover the reflection off the water is simply incredible. I am not a photographer, but fiddling with my digital camera I was able to take a few photos that I thought were pretty cool. All of these were taken at night time, meaning it was pitch dark outside except for the moonlight.

I also took a few sunset shots from Off The Wall Beach Bar at Cane Bay last weekend. Those are below.

After checking out the Green Cay beach area with the dogs we decided to stop at the Brew Pub on the way back through town. Shortly after arriving a salvage boat showed up in front of us to rescue one of the 40+ boats that had been sunk during Hurricane Omar. Here are a few of the photos:

If that is going too fast for you you can also check out the photos here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/chad.p.walter/IslandGirl?authkey=0adOEra0-I0#

The damage from the storm doesn’t seem to be to terribly bad from my vantage point. I drove around a little while ago and there are many trees down all over the place, blocking roads, knocking down fences, etc, but that seems to be the extent of it, at least on my little area of the island.

I still don’t have power, hopefully later today. I saw crews out fixing downed lines.

Here are the photos I took this morning: http://picasaweb.google.com/chad.p.walter/Omar?authkey=RQGAbo15uNQ#

Omar

The storm has passed and we are all fine. It picked up speed and moved through the area quicker than I inititially expected. Omar turned into a category 3 and things were extremely loud and noisy from about 10:30 – 1:00. I was questioning whether the windows were going to hold with so much pressure put upon them. We got a bunch of water through our water facing windows (because they are crap), but other than that no issues inside the house. It is no longer raining so I walked down to the water (the sea is loud at the moment) but it was hard to tell anything. Lots of palms and coconuts on the ground.

I lost phone service around 11:15 or so. Surprisingly that just came back up a little after 3:00.

No power yet but likely tomorrow at some point. Curfew in effect until 11:00 am.

Thanks for all the concerned emails and calls.

Maybe some aftermath photos to come tomorrow.

The high winds have begun and the rain is coming in sideways. The power has also just went out this very minute. But my sprint wireless card appears to be functional. I had just started watching the US Soccer game too, so that is a bummer.

They issued a 6:00pm curfew and called in the national guard earlier today, but I doubt many folks would be out in this weather. Emily just lit a few candles and the kerosene lantern which should be bright enough to read by actually. The battery operated fan is now going too. We have also moved into the interior room with no windows.

It doesn’t appear that I will be able to get any storm photos this evening as it is pitch black outside. Forecast is to get worse over the next 4 hours and then hopefully be gone by early morning.

The photo is from late this afternoon. Tons of rain and more to come.

Since Emily has been really slow at posting (yes it has been a year) I will go ahead and let everyone know we finally made it. Yes, it has been two plus years of planning and researching (of course we did other things during these two years) but we finally made it. We first arrived on August 17th. I have been back and forth several times to Dallas to get the dogs, figure out house stuff, and ship all the crap that we don’t need down here. We shipped our first car at the end of July and Berry from Flemmings Transport met us at the airport with it. That was nice. Expensive, but nice.

I arrived on Tuesday as my official move date. Emily has been here 6 weeks now. We are staying in a beachfront rental temporarily. Trying to rent something off-island was a bit of a pain so we found a vacation rental that would give us a “decent” rate for a 3 month rental. I wouldn’t say it is perfect, but it is on the beach. It is definitely serviceable. There has been so much water in the air this week that it is literally dripping off the fan and puddling below. The temporary screens on the window are constantly wet. The waves have been enormous as well. I have no idea how high they were, but at Judith’s Fancy the other day I would wager that at a few spots they were reaching at least six feet. I could be way off but they looked really big to me.

Much has happened in the past year, but I will let Emily update you. Look for frequent posts and photos from here on out.