Why, What Did You Do This Weekend?

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Hawksbill Turtle, St. Thomas
Originally uploaded by reallyct

At some point during our Thanksgiving trip to Bonaire, I turned to devoted partner and said that my eighteen-year-old self would never have imagined herself hauling nitrox tanks around an arid island and throwing herself 80 feet underwater. I followed that pronouncement by saying that my eighteen-year-old self didn't know what she was talking about when it came to how to have a good time.

Courtesy of devoted partner's very generous company, we spent the holiday weekend in St. Thomas, our every need catered to.

Except for the weather.

It rained pretty much nonstop for the entire weekend except, of course, for yesterday morning as we prepared to leave. Not the traditional January weather in the Caribbean for sure. Once upon a time, I'm sure I would have moped about wondering why I wasn't getting a tan, racking up room service and pay per view bills, and generally being a not at all good travel companion (see also forcing devoted partner to play interminable hands of gin). But I'm in a seize the day kind of phase of my life and just because the weather was less than optimal was no reason for me to abandon my crazy cruise director behavior.

This is how at 7:00am on Saturday, after four hours of sleep (there was a lot of highly encouraged nighttime revelry on this trip) we found ourselves the recipients of a wake-up call and room service breakfast and, by 9:00am, were on the scuba boat heading for our two dives. It's how the following day, when I let us sleep in until 8:00am, we hopped the ferry boat to St. John and spent the entire day snorkeling. Our excellent theory being, if we were going to get wet anyway, we might as well get wet in the water actually doing things.

Was it the best scuba/snorkeling we've done. Absolutely not. The visibility wasn't terrific. But we saw a turtle, always a high point, and though there was too much sediment for a good photo, devoted partner found a sleeping baby nurse shark. Job well done. We were wet and cold (or at least I was) a fair bit of the time, but when I think of the alternatives, I think we did pretty well. And this made me realize what a huge bonus it is to be with someone who also would rather regret the things he's done than the things he hasn't done. We're both working on extending this idea to more facets of our lives, but I like that, almost independently, we're deciding to be a little more proactive, and a little less mopey.

I don't spend a lot of time here going on about how lucky I feel to be the devoted partner of devoted partner, mostly because he reads this and is easily embarrassed, but as we scoured the sandy bottom for hiding sting rays while our butts got poured on, I felt pretty damn lucky. I just thought I should share.