Day 4 and 5

---

Day 4:
Today was zip-line day! We spent the morning trying to survive a winding, mountainous bus ride through St. Lucia’s crazy roads. Good news, we did it! The bus ride up to the rainforest was about a 30 minute ride with about 20 other people. We split up into groups of 8 when we arrived and geared up to ride a tram through the rainforest to an elevation of about 1600 feet. During the 45 minute tram ride we learned all about the flora and fauna of St. Lucia. To my disappointment, monkeys have never been introduced to the island because they used to export a large crop of bananas (they now focus their efforts on tourism). The guide knew all of the latin names for pretty much every plant, tree, or fruit along the way. We learned lots of interesting things. At the top we hiked for 15 or so minutes with our group until we reached the first of 11 platforms. We were given a 5 minute crash course in zip lining and off we went into the trees. Eric and I got some great pictures of us zip-lining through the trees! One by one our group descended a series of long and short, fast and slow lines held on by three safety harnesses. At the end we hiked back up the route we zip-lined to the top of the tram, taking the tram down to a rum punch station. We’re really glad we did this shore excursion, we met a lot of fun people (hello, this is where the young people were hiding) and got to take a pretty great adventure through the woods. Can’t wait to show you the pictures!
Tonight we FINALLY watched the Dark Knight in the ships theater. It was amazing. Tomorrow is Barbados beach and rum shore excursion. Miss you guys!

Day 5:
Barbados was today’s destination. We woke up to beautiful sunny weather and headed out to our Malibu rum/beach tour excursion. It was a brief bus ride and we arrived at the Malibu distillery and beach, you were allowed to tour the facility (hard hats included) but since we only had 3 hours we decided to stick at the beach. It was a long sandy beach and the water was almost too warm, it wasn’t even refreshing. We did enjoy swimming in it and there was a sand bar that went out a few hundred feet. We had been harassed all morning about renting a Jet ski and we kept declining, and then we saw 4 horses swimming up to the beach. It seemed as if they were dropped off from a boat way out in the ocean and were heading into shore. We instantly ran over there to try to ride them, but they were the 1 thing that was NOT for sale on the beach. They were racing horses, and they were brought into the ocean for training purposes. We got lots of pictures and we got to pet them, so that was fun! Later we found a little dog that we tried to play with, but he only had a 2 minutes attention span and then moved on to more exciting people. We spent the rest of the day (from about 1:00 onward) on the ship, and are now sailing towards Martinique. We haven’t had a good internet connection so we’ve only been posting our blog every other day. Can’t believe tomorrow is day 7…..we don’t want to go home yet! (of course we miss you all…..and Clyde)

Love you, E&J

---