Someone recently said to me that you can live on a boat and travel up and down the coast, and that’s living on a boat. It’s nice enough, but it ain’t a vacation. Then, for a few month of the year, you get your boat to the Bahamas and suddenly, you’re in vacation mode.

Of course, our time in the Bahamas got off to a rocky start, so it took a while to settle into vacation mode. Plus, there’s the whole thing about your body arriving and your mind catching up later. Last week, we had a lot of fun with Michael and Lori aboard, but I think my mind still hadn’t caught up with my body. Today, at Lee Stocking Island, all that seemed to change.

You know you’re on vacation when:

• You wake up, get in a dinghy and explore five different beaches, and you’re the only people on any of them!
• You scrabble up some hillsides to peaks where you can see the dark blue Atlantic ocean on one side and the azure blues of the Bahamas on the other!
• You go snorkeling and see lots of coral heads and reef fish.
• In your travels, you keep seeing small groups of large rays swimming in the shallows
• You discover a bird you’ve never seen before
• You find a trail and take it to yet another empty beach
• You find another trail and take it for a mile or so only to discover it leads to an abandoned ocean research center
• You roam through the remains of the research facility, reviewing binders of research proposals, looking through floppy disks and seeing rooms of abandoned fish tanks
• You do all of this before lunch. After lunch, friends come over to play board games. They bring fresh baked bread!
• Later you make popcorn and watch some dumb netflix show.

Now, that’s a vacation day!

Whew! What a busy day. Let’s do it again tomorrow!