Teresa Nelson: St Croix FUN.

At the awards ceremony we had the honor of hanging out with Sister Madonna. Mark and Jeff were zooted out in their fancy Zoot button ups to match her. Sister Madonna told us some great stories of her past and her race at St Croix. Including that of a leach being tied to her during the swim (someone wouldn't stop touching her), mounting and remounting her bike three times on the beast and her desire to return to Kona (her, umm, somewehre around 35th ironman). We will be cheering her like mad in Canada :) Thanks for a wonderful evening Sister Madonna.

Post race we became super busy with only 3.5 days to see the island. (Hence the lack of blog posts) We went to an amazing meal at Bocchaus. Where,not only did I eat an entire filet, but as you can see, we order an array of desserts (all three went down our hatchets).

By morning we were up and running, okay, everyone but me was up and running, I relaxed by the pool, they used the pool as an ice bath :)

After we fried our skin enough to actually be the lobster we saw snorkeling the next day.

(aghh...relaxing in the hammock)

(my pool boy crush)

Then we were off to eat again,this time to a place some locals recommended, we had to venture into this cave to get there. We found it very amusing that at all but one of our restaurants the servers just slide a white board over with the specials and say "let me know if you have any questions."

Then we took a small boat over to Island on the Cay, this is where the swim start was for the race, little did we know what the rest of the night had in store. It started with a bit of entertainment from this man, dancing around and breaking glass, then jumping on the glass...BAREFOOT.

Then it turned to this:

(tongue out is a sign of concentration)

(cleared)

(Jeff's feet don't turn quite like Mark's)

(mission accomplished)

(the crazy man)

Then rain shower hit, they hit hard....we waited for a boat to get back across, no luck for some time, we hid in a boat,planned an escape in the boat, contemplated if we would go to jail, if we would ever get out of jail, and then our boat arrived...soaking wet, laughing, and thinking we were all being a bit crazy, thinking we could actually pull of an escape.

(random photo on the street)

We took a boat (40 min crossing) to Buck Island for snorkeling and walking on the beautiful sand, your feet literally sunk 4 inches with each step and the untouched land is indescribable. However the trip over left Mark a bit green in the face with the waves surpassing that of an Deadliest Catch episode. The coral and fish were amazing, more coral than fish, but it was so close to us, we were swimming over the top of it. Once on beach, we saw little shark nearly 3 feet from the shoreline and a pelican diving for fish over and over again, it was an amazing sight to see.