days 4 & 5: more beach and river.

Friday

Thursday nite after we got home from Port Antonio, we watched the news for a little bit to see if there was any more word about the hurricane that could possibly be headed for Jamaica. Sure enough The Weather Channel was predicting a direct hit sometime on sunday. Cool.

I really wasn't concerned in the slightest for 2 reasons, 1) my only experience with a hurricane before this was when Rita completely missed the Houston-area coast and everyone got worked up for nothing and 2) we were on the 3rd floor, seriously what could happen to us up here - there's not even very much glass at all because of the shutters. And I was convinced if there was going to be a hurricane, it would make a really cool story, I didn't want to leave.

So I went to bed and slept like a rock. When I got up Mom appeared to have not slept at all and instead spent the whole nite worrying about the could-be hurricane. Dad, even though he had the same position as me, had called the airlines and done all that he could to see if there was any way off the island and there wasn't unless you had a private jet. Mom couldn't harp on that anymore.

So we made it another beach day and basked all morning in the beautiful weather on the beautiful sand in front of the beautiful water. Around 11 the water sports pimp [we had been approached every day since we got there] came up to see if by now we had decided on anything, snorkeling, fishing, jet skis, etc. Dad said me and Kaitlin should go para-sailing. Mom and Dad had already done this on a previous trip. We said okay.

Mom, Kaitlin, and I climbed on the boat and went off shore a little ways while being fastened into our harnesses. I said I would go first and so the guy kinda threw the rainbow parasail thing in the air [at first it looked like he was pitching it in the water] and magically it caught wind and wanted to fly away like a kite on steroids. He fastened my carabiner and let me go and off I went into the air. I don't know how long the rope was and I'm a really bad judge of distance, but I was pretty far up in the air and the view was of course amazing. You're so high up that even though the boat is moving at some given speed - enough to keep the slack out of the line - you feel like you're just sitting in a swing, in mid-air, with your feet dangling, hardly moving at all. I don't have any pictures of this because Mom grabbed the video camera case instead of the regular camera case, just this one dad took from the beach of us getting on the boat when I suppose he realized we got the wrong one. But you can take my word for it, it was pretty amazing.

The rest of the day we spent shopping and for dinner we went to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville at my sister's insistence. The words 'tourist trap' couldn't be used anymore appropriately. I won't elaborate on how awful it was but needless to say my sister didn't get to pick again the rest of the trip.

Saturday

Well, we knew Hurricane Dean was coming so went to Dunn's River Falls on saturday, the one thing left we hadn't done that we definitely wanted to see before we left. We have been snorkeling and deep sea fishing before, so if that got scraped it would be okay. Dunn's River Falls is 600 feet of cascading waterfalls that flow from a river coming down the side of a mountain into the ocean. You start at the bottom and climb your way to the top, you start out in this chain with your group kind of pulling each other up but that kind of broke up after the first little phase. The water is coming down pretty fast and hard and it's cold and the rocks you are climbing are misshapen and sometimes slippery with algae. After making it straight up the first phase I looked down and thought, if I slip I will die. It was exhilarating. [Oh and the water looks muddy in the pictures, but its really clear, its just the huge rocks it's going over.]

The fear evaporated and I was quite shocked with my agility and cat-like maneuvers as I climbed up, quite the opposite of the way I was expecting things to go down. We stopped a few times for photo ops, to soak in the rushing water, once for our guide to push Kaitlin and I down this spot in the rocks where the water rushed down furiously and made a pseudo-water slide, and a few more times for me to get the river silt and rocks out of my chaco's - if I ever go back I'm definitely taking closed, dorky water shoes to climb in. But overall this was immensely fun and a good work-out, I felt really refreshed afterwards probably my #2 favorite thing after the river rafting trip.

We drove around some, went to see Fern Gully, an area that is very rainforest-esque, the growth is so thick and tall it closes out almost all sunlight [pictures below] then we got lunch and went home and set out around 3 to see if there were any more stores open to do a last bit of shopping but most were boarding up. I made a last minute purchase of some sunglasses and then we headed home. Raquel and Winsome had come by and taped the small windows above the shutters and brought down all the furniture from the roof. We had dinner that Winsome had made, fish [no heads or tails], vegetables, and rice, and then watched tv [mostly the weather channel] on the couch together with the windows open hardly believing the extreme warnings and predictions the weatherpeople were giving with such vigor. Their favorite word was "catastrophic". Right before we went to bed we flipped to CNN and saw the new projected path of dean was not straight for Jamaica but more directly west vs. wnw. I think Mom slept a little better. Tomorrow: d-day!