coral bay – detached and amused

So, yeah, it’s been a while. We’re back at home in St. John. We’ve been back for about 6 weeks. We put aside our dreams of an epic road trip this year, tucked Coachese into a storage space in Indianapolis and got the hell out of there. We’ve done a lot of harebrained stuff over the years, and most of the time it’s pretty much worked out. Not so much with Coachese. Not yet. Anyway, on the way home we spent a few more weeks in Florida, visiting family and gathering a bunch of stuff to take back with us to the Virgin Islands. This time the bulk of our luggage consisted of 175 lbs of bumper plates (weights) for our barbells. Not even kidding. We are fairly ridiculous.

This is Frances. All suited up from our flight. At this point we’re in a car on a boat and we’re almost home. Wembley is in the back, drugged senseless.

This is what happened when we finally got home.

Having abandoned our house in the tropics for the better part of a year, it should not be surprising to learn that we came home to quite a mess. This was enhanced by the fact that our house was a disaster even before we left. More on that here.
Now that we’re back we’re trying to make the house more livable and settle into our island routine. We’ve made some progress…cleaning, painting…finding, buying and installing some actual appliances (beat it, hot plate). We built a makeshift plywood kitchen counter that should be temporary but that I’m sure we’ll be stuck with for years to come. Also, more cleaning.

Before

Counter in progress

No, that’s not Home Depot. That’s our new stuff.

Classy plywood counter.

Somehow, while we were gone, our toilet broke. That was a pretty big drag for a while, as I’m sure you can imagine. The house came with this crazy, power-flush toilet which is apparently really water efficient but for which no one on island had any parts. So now we have a brand new toilet. Go us. Cross that one off the list. To give you a glimpse of our glamorous life in the tropics, here are a few of the things that are still on the list:

Figure out why our water tanks seem so empty. Like almost everyone here, we collect the rainwater from our roof to use in our house. For everything. There is no city water. So the rain falls on the roof, flows through our gutters and collects in these big tanks outside. Theoretically, unless there’d been a crazy drought, our tanks should be brimming with water because it’s been raining and we haven’t been using the water for a year, right? But when I bang on our tanks they seem mostly empty. I’m not a scientist, but I think somewhere, somehow, we have a problem.
Get the pool refilled. We drained it to deter squatters while we were away. Also, we switched to a saltwater system because buying chlorine and chemicals is horrible and I was always turning our pool green. Again, not a scientist. Apparently, we are missing a part from this new system and we need to buy either a mysterious part or a whole new salt system. Plus, we have to talk a water delivery guy into driving a tank truck up our road. Also we have to find the water delivery guy before we can talk to him. Here’s the thing, the pool is tiny and we never used it much (partly because it was always green and very scary) so it’s kind of tempting to just forget about it, but looking at an empty pool is way more depressing than you think it would be. Let’s hear it for first world problems.
Beautiful, no?
Get our driveway paved or at least graded. Our driveway is a little treacherous in the best of times. Last year, no shit, some tourists in an SUV mistook our driveway for the road and skidded down our hill and almost into our house, taking out a couple of trees in the process. They were fine, don’t worry. The best and weirdest part? It was actually a bride IN HER DRESS with all her bridesmaids on their way to her wedding. It was a very surreal morning. Anyway, the driveway is much worse now, so we really need to get on that. We know a guy who will help us with this but he has to get his ‘dozer back from the country. So…no idea.
This is a shot from when the Wedding Crashers crashed last year. That’s their car hanging perilously by a tree. Jennifer’s expression is completely unscripted.
We need to build a fence to keep the donkeys, goats, and deer out of the yard. They eat everything, they poop everywhere, and Wembley hates them. It looks like there used to be a fence around the property so I’m thinking this might not be a huge deal. I’ve been wrong before. In the meantime, we built a very ramshackle contraption out of pvc pipes and chicken wire to grow a few vegetables on our own. You know, so we don’t get scurvy. It was very flimsy so we spray painted it black. Now it looks sturdy. I think we’ve got a solid 7% chance that we’ll actually get to eat some of these things before the animals destroy them.
Flimsy.

Sturdy.
Replace the shack deck. We have a little rental cottage/shack and we actually have a lovely lady renting it as is, which is nice. She’s very brave. But it has a deck that is about to fall over and we are determined to replace it before we have to hide her body in the woods after she falls off and kills herself. The soil here is very rocky and I can only imagine what a pain in the ass grave-digging is. Plans are actually kind of underway for this project (the deck, not the grave). We’ve talked to people. We’ve tracked down a dumpster. We’re hopeful. This could be a win.
The dumpster is here!
Find a better place to sleep. Our house is super weird. It’s like a studio with a sleeping loft that you need a ladder to access and can’t really stand up in. So we don’t sleep up there. There’s a bedroom on the pool level, but you have to go outside to get down there and there’s this weird platform thing that’s built in and the space isn’t that usable. Like, for instance, you can’t actually fit a bed in there. So we just keep all of our freak show fitness stuff down there. Also, there’s no bathroom down there, so if you have to pee in the night you have to go outside, up the stairs and into the main house. It’s not horrible, it’s just not ideal. So we don’t sleep down there, either. We sleep on the pull-out couch in the living room. Which is next to the bathroom. Because we have priorities. We need to do something about this whole situation. Ideally, we’d like to build a little workout area with a shed, tucked somewhere out of the way. And add a bathroom downstairs. We live in hope.
This should be our bedroom. What? Doesn’t your bedroom look like this? CrossFit St. John Sweet Spice. Membership: 2

Probably you can tell this list is really more for us than for you. I’ve heard it’s good to make lists. Apparently it helps you be more productive. Fingers crossed on that one. In the meantime, we’ve been having a good time catching up with our neighbors, taking the pups around the island, getting used to driving on the left again, and making everything from scratch because the food situation here is pretty grim*. We remain amused at how beautiful and kind of ridiculous it is to live here.

Sunday morning hike.

Sunday morning water break at the ruins on the Leinster Trail.

Limes

*These are our attempts at preserving some West Indian limes in salt. Why? Scurvy. I am needlessly obsessed with scurvy. Also, we got a very cool cookbook from Jennifer’s Aunt Lynn (thanks, Lynn!) and they use a lot of preserved lemons, which are not available here so we’re doing limes.

No one will be shocked to hear the Winnebago’s still not ready, right? Truthfully, we’ve almost forgotten about Coachese. It seems like we’ve been in Florida forever. There’s a lot of great stuff going on here, so we’re not complaining. But, sadly, our much anticipated, genre-defining guide to Gulfport is not quite ready yet because, well, we’re still here working on it.

Coachese, who?

As you may know, we’ve been away from our island paradise for more than seven months. We didn’t plan to be gone for that long and were starting to get the feeling maybe things weren’t going so well at our house in St. John. We came to this conclusion because we are thoughtful, intuitive people with loads of good, common sense. Also, we were getting distressing texts from our island neighbors. So, last week, we left the pups here in Florida with my parents and flew down to STJ to check on things. We were not optimistic.

Donkey poop. We hope.

Grill down.

Things degrade quickly in the tropics. And seven months is a long time. But, I have to say, things could definitely have been worse. Apparently, the drought is over so everything was pretty overgrown. It also looked like someone had been squatting in our shack. But the main house (although covered in dust and lizard poop) was pretty much OK. We’d had the pool recently drained after we heard it turned green when the power got shut off. We didn’t bother refilling it. I think not having a pool will make the place less attractive to squatters. I mean, people have standards, no?

Jennifer, armed and dangerous, tackles the yard.

So we spent a few days cleaning up, sorting out the power situation (in person, because nothing ever happens if you just call in-trust me on this), cutting back weeds, hiring a property management company to keep the place secured, trying to find contractors (which is harder than you’d think-more on that later) and putting big padlocks on everything. We also took this opportunity to transport even more IKEA furniture. If you live on a small island your luggage gets pretty sketchy, pretty quickly. Who gives a shit about underwear? We checked six chairs, a bench, and an outdoor table that seats four. For free. Not even kidding. We’ve accumulated like 90% of our furniture this way. Which is less impressive than it sounds if you saw how much furniture we actually have.

Luxury luggage. Classy.

The reality is our house in STJ is still very much a work in progress. Or a disaster zone, depending on your mindset. The Winnebago’s interior is way nicer than our house right now. Zero exaggeration, friends. But it is an amazing place and we absolutely love it. Yes, there are squatters, and droughts, and donkey poop, and ridiculous obstacles to accomplishing basic things. But there’s also so much beauty and so little marketing and crazy stuff just happens all the time. I mean, while we were gone our friend Hugo, a huge Wembley fan, somehow planted all these orchids on our trees so we’ll eventually have an orchid alley leading to our house. Who does that? That’s wonderful. I mean, probably our negligence and general irresponsibility shouldn’t be rewarded, but fuck it, we’ll take it. Thank you!