St. John (Day 2)

one of the views from the villa (click to expand)

After the Arrival Day Blues were over, Day 2 was much better!

This is all part of our arrival day strategy. On our first full day on St. John, we always plan to have no plans. Going by the mantra that inaction is not inactivity, we spent all of Day 2 at the villa we rented (Andante by the Sea). No driving, no planning, no thinking, no potential stress. An entire day to do nothing but to lie in the sun, swim in the private pool, nap in the hammock, eat, and read. The sole point of this day is to sloooow the pace waaaaay down.

And we succeeded! Within a few hours, I was in a state of samadhi via osmosis. On the rare occasions I thought about anything outside the villa or beyond the bay, the thought was like a cloud blowing by in the sky. "Yup," I'd think, "there is an outside world...oh look, it's floating away...bye bye!" Back to my nap.

By the end of the day, we had a little color going from laying out in the sun. During midday, when the sun gets really hot, I set up camp in the hammock. It's shaded by the upper deck, and there's a constant breeze to keep this comfortable. I spent at least an hour there, napping while rocking in the breeze, reading about the latest in supersymmetry, staring over the turquoise water, and listening to the ocean.

The surprise of the day was when Jim spotted an iguana that had come very close to the edge of the deck. Usually the iguanas stick to the cacti, watching us without much interest. There are usually between three to six on any given day (hence the name for the road leading up to Andante: Iguana Road).

However, on this particular day, the juicy petals of a flowering tree that rose to the edge of the deck were too tempting for this particular guy to resist. As he munched away on his afternoon snack he was close enough to touch. Of course, we were smart enough to settle for some up-close photos Jim took with his tablet. You can click this photo to expand.

Having left behind the normal pace of life, our arrival strategy is officially complete. Day 3 is the day we begin actual vacation activities...fully rested and relaxed. It works every year.