Today had many delights and delightful moments. The first delight was the sun making an appearance.
Mike went for a run, while I puttered around. He sent me this delightful photo.
We made the decision to go to Deans Blue Hole to do a morning snorkel. Our on exit out of our road, we stopped to chat with the homeowners of our rental and they gave us a papaya, another Christmas delight.
We arrived at Deans along with all the other people on vacation here it seemed. It was so busy, I was lucky to take one photo with no one around.
Snorkeling wasn’t optimal and the fish were not abundant this early in the morning. But I was happy I finally took a decent picture of a needle fish. I collected four sand dollars but this trip they were all brittle and I broke all but one.
over the edge of the blue hole 
peering over the edge again 
brittle sand dollar 
stop fishy and smile 
As we made the decision to leave, a young woman approached us and asked if we were headed into Clarence Town. We hadn’t made a decision yet, so we said “do you need us to?”. She shyly informed us her and her friend needed a ride back to their boat at the marina. They had walked and hitched rides to get to Deans but didn’t want to do the walk back. We happily agreed and had a delightful time returning them to their boat. We learned they were helping to crew from the BVIs to Florida, the trip was taking longer than expected and were supposed to be in Florida last week. There are on the 60 foot Catamaran, Pono.
After drop off, we decided a visit to Lochabar Bay was in order. OH MY more people. We have never seen so many people at spots. And by more people I mean a total of six people in two cars. Lochabar is always delightful for a beach walk and sometimes a quick dip. Today the winds were causing the water to be a bit murky, but it was still beautiful.
On our way out we chatted with a wonderful family from Canada, it was their first visit to Long Island and they asked for recommendations. Mike was the perfect tour guide, letting them know some of our favorite and not to miss places. I finally dragged him away, as I think we were overwhelming them, guess you could easily say we like it here!
It was lunch time so off to Ford’s we went, knowing it we had the best chance of it being people free. Yup, no one was around and we found Santa was hanging up his hat here, along with his reindeer, they were getting blitzened.
Our final stop was to inspect the salt flats in Hard Bargain. Diamond Crystal and Salt owned the flats in the 70s, closed operations, a shrimp farmer took over, but that didn’t last. Hurricane Joaquin destroyed the bridges in the area so you can’t get out to the ocean by foot. We drove down an abandoned runway and on some beach roads till we found a spot to park and just walked around. To our delight we discovered the flats had oodles and oodles of upside jellyfish. Yup we were totally geeking out over the amount and different sizes of them.
driving on the runway 
upside down jellyfish 
an entire congregation of them 
Looking out over at some of the flats 
We returned back mid afternoon to the house. I “worked” on photos and video while Mike prepped dinner. The views from the house were stunning, even more than the word delightful.
We headed over to Galloway for sunset viewing and it was better than the previous night, not as much cloud cover, but enough that obscured the sun melting into the horizon.
We came home to dinner of chicken enchiladas and salad, called it an early night to read.
One of the homeowners left me a book to read, Out Island Doctor which is my favorite type of book, a book about the history of the place we love to visit. It is a biography of man in the 1930s that became a doctor to the out islands out of necessity and changing his career path from being a teacher in Indiana. This book is a treasured delight.
Christmas Day for us was delightful, full of many delights. I hope your day was full of delight.
CTHikergal Travels 
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