We are officially waiting. Tropical storm Don is circling (WTF!?!) between Bermuda and the Azores. If we were to leave today (which we strongly considered), we would run into the headwinds (easterlies) off the storm several days out. Instead, we’re chill’n in Bermuda. AYFKM!?
There’s always something to do. Cleaning (because we got some serious salt) and painting, little things here and there. The weird and wonderful thing? There aren’t any crucial projects because, amazingly, we didn’t break anything on the way here!
We blew in here on 18-22 knot winds and rowed hard (one way) in order to check out the town of St George. As soon as it laid down, though, we rowed over to check out the dramatic bones of a wreck right off the small craft mooring area.
After the scorching heat and dead calm of the middle-part of the voyage, Bermuda’s fresh breeze and pleasurable warmth have felt reassuring, welcoming. We are getting to know the tangled streets and alleys of St George.
The laundromat is just uphill from the dinghy dock on Shinbone Alley. Google maps doesn’t encourage the pedestrian path between the two, but we figured it out on the way back. Every single towel aboard had been pressed into service for sopping up some kinda thing. All those rain storms plus that one rogue wave that inundated even Beluga Greyfinger where he swayed down below in the main saloon…Whew. Lotta work for towels. Buying and adding value to the laundry card has been the one and only transaction that required Bermudian cash. Everyone else accepts BM or US dollars. James circled the neighborhood for the correct BM bills in sufficient quantities for the machine while I (Dena) pretended to understand the nice elderly gentleman who wanted to tell me all about his 35 years on the island.
The grocery store has a salad and hot bar that is an excellent source of wahoo in cream or lemon-butter or fried as nuggets in a delicate coating or as strips in a rugged one (when it’s not all goat and chicken which, to be fair, has only been one day so far). Oh, and when they say peas and rice, they mean like black-eyed peas, no mushy green peas in that British fashion. Delicious and filling.
We did little walks at first, nothing like the big hike after our 20 days to Hawaii back in 2006. Finally, we wanted to see a bit more of the East End and did a longer walk.
The idiosyncratic architectural feature round these parts is one that photographs well. It’s hard to complain about the beautiful melding of form and function.
Multiple forts of differing ages gave us something to clamber around, but the view of narrow-ass Town Cut was less impressive from land than from the boat. We have a privileged perspective on so many things from Cetacea.
And then there’s life and art and people who care enough to create and install things like this.
We brought water for the walk but no food and ended up looping back towards town out of sheer hunger.
Bermuda doesn’t feel like it’s stuck in the past for the most part…and then there’s…
We’ve discovered an incredible civilization here in the middle of the Atlantic flow of the Earth’s ocean. So while we wait for Don to stop being pissed off between us and the next leg of this electric circumnavigation, we’ll chill and be civilized.
