Downpour

On Sunday, I learned a valuable lesson about taking my camera with me wherever I go.

After the outing to Sage Mountain, it began to rain. It rained heavily, and steadily, from about 2:30 until around 4:15. When the rain lightened up, HB and I decided to go to Mulligan's to watch the Broncos game. Since we were just going to Mulligan's, a place I had already blogged about, I didn't take my camera.

As a result, I will have to describe to you the impromptu waterfall we saw cascading down the mountain about a quarter mile from the house. I can only tell you about how all the major streets in downtown Road Town were flooded, with waters rising over the curbs in many places. I will have to use words to convey the potentially car-destroying rubble from the minor landslides we saw along the Great Mountain Road, and the unexpected sight of live-rooster-bedecked above-ground graves in the cemetery, where the fowl were sheltering from the flood water.

Perhaps most disappointing is that I have no pictures of the driveway in Sea Cow's Bay, half of which had been destroyed by the rainwater. After obliterating the steep driveway, the rain had carved a four-foot-deep gash in the mountain-side, carrying all the debris from the driveway and the mountain out into the coastal highway we were driving on.

Amidst all the destruction, I did not have my camera to take a picture of the truly bizarre -- an eighteenth-century style sloop, moored without sails in Sea Cow's Bay, as though on Talk Like a Pirate Day, some real pirates had sailed into Tortola for the occasion.

Lesson learned, BVIs, lesson learned.