Missing Willow Farm

Every bed is planted.

The garlic should have scapes soon.

Future cabbage.

Jerusalem artichoke rhizomes. We’ve wanted these for a while but never think about them until the growing season is over. All of our normal seed suppliers were completely out. I found these on Etsy.

Hot peppers started from seed indoors.

Can’t wait for these to flower so we can enjoy some new potatoes.

Poblanos and jalepenos are already starting to flower.

The garlic we planted last Fall is looking awesome. We added a few beds of seed potatoes before we left for vacation.

The beet seeds I planted a week ago are peeking out of our well-fertilized compost.

We’ve started harvesting the first asparagus spears of the season.

We fell in love with snorkeling in Jost Van Dyke BVI .

Coconuts were everywhere. We tried pina coladas served in coconut shells.

We visited a chocolate factory and learned how they turn cocoa beans into candy bars.

We visited a banana plantation.

Here’s our ship, the Seabourn Quest. It has just 450 passengers.

A typical, beautiful sunset.

Unlimited caviar onboard.

We attended a bordeaux tasting.

Some local Caribbean inhabitants.

The view of the island on approach by our ship’s tender. Very mysterious looking.

Such a lush tropical place!

Entrance to one of the cells. We had open access to most of the buildings. There was even a small hotel and restaurant on the island. We couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to stay, though. You can walk around the entire island in about 90 minutes.

The ruins of two solitary cells.

Scary things can become beautiful with time.

The grounds had beautiful flowering trees and bushes.

This is a missile monitoring tower that supports the French spaceport on the island next door.

This little guy is an agouti. They’re everywhere. They have cute orange rumps and feed off of coconuts and nuts on the island. They’re like a very large guinea pig with long legs and are used to people admiring them.

The island had a healthy colony (a muster, actually) of peafowl. The hens were ignoring the males completely, despite their best efforts.

Hello gorgeous!

Another photo. Just because.

This is called the meeting of the waters, and happens in a lot of spots along the Amazon river. This is where the Tapajos river feeds into the Amazon. We saw a ton of dolphins here, but they were too quick to capture in a photo. The most interesting were the pink dolphins, which were huge.

There were horses and cattle wading in the water everywhere. I imagine they find higher ground at night for sleeping.

We passed this family on our journey. Homes were few and far between, and always up on stilts. This farmer was very proud of the caiman he had freshly caught.

We passed this gorgeous river hawk. It reminded me of the one who lives along our driveway at home.

We saw a few sloths lounging in trees along our route. This one made me giggle. Our captain turned us around for a closer look and he didn’t like us staring at him. Rather than move, he slooowly grabbed a branch and moved it in front of his face. Dude, we can still see you….

Look at this gorgeous iguana! He couldn’t care less that we paused to admire him.

We stopped for about 30 minutes to fish for piranha. We used raw beef as bait (of course). Check out the teeth on this thing!

Our tour boat did quite well. There were white, black and red ones caught. These were all returned to the river as they only do catch and release fishing. These fish do attack and kill people on occasion, particularly during the dry season when food is scarce. We were happy to see them up close from inside our boat.

The trip back to our ship was gorgeous, back through the dolphins and next to where tons of soybeans were being loaded onto cargo ships.