underdogishere

I have recently upgraded the operating system in my camera. "What's that?" you say. "Your camera has an operating system?" Yes, I was surprised, too. I was even more surprised to find that my camera has, not one operating system, but two. Although, thinking about it, I guess it makes sense that one would manage the camera (focus, exposure, etc.) and the other the file system (writing to the media, etc.), since those are two very different types of tasks.

Anyway, both operating systems needed to be upgraded, hopefully curing my camera of a tendency to corrupt image files as it saves them.

And why, I'm sure you're wondering, was it so important for me to perform this upgrade?

Because I was going on a trip.

Now I'm back. I was gone for two weeks, which partly explains my long silence on this blog. The first week was spent on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin islands. This was the view from our balcony (click for a larger image):



Through the fronds of the palm trees growing just off the balcony, you can see the adjacent marina, and that island in the not-so-distant distance is Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands.

We spent some time snorkeling on St. John, a short drive and a short ferry ride from where we stayed. A really great place to snorkel on St. John is Water Lemon Cay. We saw sea turtles, rays, starfish, a small octopus, and all manner of corals and fish. Oh, and a shark. A shark!!! All in nice, shallow water. The only drawback to Water Lemon Cay is that it's about a two mile hike along a trail from the end of the nearest road. But it's worth it. Here's Judi hiking along the trail:



Remember to carry some water (as Judi is doing).

The most interesting challenge on St. Thomas was driving on the left. Judi was a huge help, yelling "ON THE LEFT! ON THE LEFT!" each time I started driving (whenever I got in the car and started away, I always automatically drove on the right), and also checking the cross-traffic for me when I was trying to make a left-turn-on-red at an intersection. Thanks!

While we were there we also visited the Butterfly Farm (twice). You can read an account on Judi's Butterflies blog here, and some photos from those visits were Judi's Photos of the Day around that time.

That was the first of the two weeks. We'll see if I get to the second.

Labels: Inner Geek, Travel