Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 15

June 2, 2009
St Thomas

You’re laid off, living off your severance pay, and working a crap-pay job at an art gallery schlepping frames, so what do you do?? Take a trip to the Virgin Islands! It’s hard to pass up 2 seven dollar tickets to paradise.. Eddie Money would be proud.

What can I say except wow.. this was our second trip to Water Island, and it was just as cool as I remember from the first time. Our friend Ray owns a home there, and last time we went, he wasn’t yet living there full time, but this time he was, and he took us all over the place showing us the cool places to go and drink. We spent a day on St John snorkeling and playing horseshoes at the Skinny Legs bar up on the hillside. I’ll tell you that the Caribbean has a profound effect on me. The laid back attitudes of the locals is infectious. They have no money, and live practically in a third-world country, but they are for the most part far happier than the people I’ve encountered elsewhere.

I don’t consider myself a beach person, probably because the beaches near central Florida are over-crowded, lined with ugly-as-shit condos, and populated by some of the scariest people you’d care to meet. Not so much in the Caribbean, the beaches are clean and far more beautiful, and what people there are, are considerably less scary than those you’d find at say, Cocoa beach. I spent two full days on the beach at honeymoon bay on ray’s island, sipping rum, and reading in a beach chair under a coconut palm, and saw probably 30 people, the greater part of them people who lived there on the island, or on the sailboats anchored to buoys in the bay. Now, I know… Water Island is a residential island with 45 homes on it, so this probably isn’t a fair assessment of ALL the beaches in the Caribbean, but I’ve decided to use this place as the model for my ultimate destination in my journey. If I could live on or near such a place, I would consider myself one of the luckiest people alive. Others need big cities to feel happiness; I need things on a much smaller scale, a much slower pace, and far fewer people definitely.

We came back from that trip with a renewed passion for becoming island people. We had originally talked of a ten-year plan to live on a sailboat, now we felt pressed to make that plan happen sooner, neither of us were working anything remotely resembling secure jobs, and the economy didn’t seem like it was picking up at all, so we started dreaming, and scheming…