Day 10 – Tears and Watermelon

No the watermelon didn’t cause the tears today, but a hike did.

Let’s do a hike around the Freshwater Lake. The guide book for this island said 2 miles, about an hour to complete. Cool we thought. Nice little loop around the lake at the elevation of the lake, right?

NO!

The book didn’t stress that we had a 588 ft elevation gain, or hiking up ridges on towering peaks, then down, crossing ridge lines between mountains.

Would we have skipped it if we knew what it really was going to be like? Probably not.

The book was right on the mileage but it took us 90 minutes, not bad considering I had a meltdown of a few tears after the last straight up. I remember at one point saying to Mike I see a trail going up, but we aren’t doing that one? He didn’t know and guess what? We had to go up that trail I spied in the distance.

I’m dumping the photos here, they won’t be in the right order but it will give a feel for the hike.

After the hike, we thought if we could find parking in the capitol, we would check the fish market. That was a big ask, there is no parking anywhere. The streets are crazy narrow, with people parking on both sides and in some spots, gutters that are sometimes 6 inches deep, that you easily drop into with the car.

The traffic is so slow, you can stop and have fruit handed right to your car. People sell fruit out of trucks parked next to the street. A guy asked us if we wanted watermelon. Duh, yes we do, he went and picked us a watermelon, he handed it to Mike who gave him the money.

I didn’t have time to get the watermelon in the backseat until we were out of the city. It requires us both to be aware when driving, so it sat at my feet.

After we returned home, Mike went down for a swim, I stared at all the photos we took instead and tried to recover.

This was a day I didn’t expect to have…