This will be my last post in the blog. This week has been great and my expectations were greatly exceeded. Even though we were really busy everyday, I feel like a learned so much from this class. On our last day in Virgin Gorda we woke up and had breakfast before walking down to the community service site. Our job was to create a design and paint it onto a wall. We additionally had to paint four concrete boxes surrounding palm trees. It was a pretty easy job but it took a few hours. Right as we were wrapping things up, it began to rain and of course paint and water do not mix very well so the paint got a bit runny but since it had already dried for the most part, the water did not ruin our paint job. After finishing the community service project we had lunch. When we were done with lunch, we basically had the entire afternoon to ourselves. I think everyone went down to the beach and soaked up the sun for a few hours. It was fun to play frisbee in the water. After a few hours at the beach we walked back up to the villas where we got ready for dinner which was awesome! The restaurant literally sat on the water and the food was great. Following dinner, we watched two short movies that the Dive BVI staff had made. It was cool to see some of the pictures from earlier in the week and it brought back some good memories.
The next day, we woke up really early around 4am and headed down to the docks where Jeff and Casey took us to Beef Island. It was hard to say goodbye after such a fun and eventful week. We walked in the rain to the airport and got our boarding passes. For some reason they gave me such a hard time while going through security but when I finally got through I was quite relieved. We waited for about an hour before boarding the plane. The flight to San Juan was really short, only about 45 minutes. Things went downhill once we got in San Juan at about 9am. The flight which was scheduled to depart at 12pm was delayed a full 9 hours! Everyone was pretty mad but I had 8 movies on my laptop which I watched. When we finally walked off the plane in Dallas I was so happy but also very tired. I proceeded to go home and go straight to bed.
This trip provided a multifaceted experience; we had the opportunity to go on some great dives and see amazing things, but at the same time this was a class and we were learning a lot about coral and different fish species in the BVI. With that said, I would like to thank Brian, Jeff, Laura, and Casey for making this an unforgettable trip. I realize that there was a lot of work behind-the-scenes and I also thank you all for that. I came back to Dallas with far more knowledge about marine life then when I left. I hope I can come back next year and build of off some of the fun experiences of this trip.
