From Sun to Snow

After enjoying the Caribbean for a week, we were dramatically re-introduced to New England winters with another snow storm, delivering 6″ or more. The roads were plowed, but because of rain preceding the snow the roads were very slippery – I nearly hit a wall when trying to drive to work, so gave up and waited for the next day!

And next day, the roads are clear and lined by beautiful white trees; at work these Robins have found a few left-over apples on a tree outside Christian’s office, but there’s not much food when the ground is covered in snow and ice!

The U.S. Virgin Islands

This is the view from our room, perched right at the top of a steep hill on the ocean’s edge, in the Point Pleasant Resort on St. Thomas, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean! The downside of this view was the incredibly steep roads and paths to get anywhere in the resort – after one day we rented a car so that we could get around! Another reason was that the resort had no restaurants offering breakfast, only one for lunch (and with not a very wide menu choice); I supposed we could have cooked, since our room had a kitchen …


Here’s our room, from a nearby road – you can see how high it is (our room is top right on the rightmost building):

 

St. Thomas was quite strange; it’s single main town catered primarily to cruise ship tourists, offering loads of jewelry shops! Elsewhere the island was all hilly with steep twisty roads, regular chances to bottom out part of the car, and a cross-section of different homes, run down areas, etc … but the views were so spectacular that any downsides were forgotten!


Another highlight was touring Coral World, with it’s sting rays, sealions, lorikeets and an underwater viewing area:


Then there was the amazing sight of watching weather roll in across the ocean – here it’s raining over part of St. Johns (another nearby U.S. Virgin island):


And, eventually, we found a nice (but tiny) beach where we could swim in the warm blue-green waters of the Caribbean ocean:

 

 

Epcot and Magic Kingdom

As well as looking at property to buy during our recent trip to Florida, we still found time to visit Epcot and Magic Kingdom – but so did the rest of the world, apparently!

Epcot is as fabulous as ever; the updated “The Seas” now features Nemo and friends from the animated movie – these gulls cheerfully call “Mine” 🙂


Our trip to Magic Kingdom was the only day when the weather wasn’t perfect, sunny and 80s – instead it rained on and off throughout the day and evening (but it was still about 70!) … being New Years Eve, it was probably the busiest day of the year for the park! There were long queues everywhere – some rides had queues of more than 1-1/2 hours – we chose to do things that didn’t involve so much queueing, like riding the railroad.
We did get a “fast pass” for Splash Mountain – we spent a couple of hours elsewhere in the park till our fast pass time came, but that shortened the actual queueing time to maybe 15 minutes …

 

We watched a (wet) parade, Mickey’s Once Upon A ChristmasTime Parade:

 

We also stayed for the 8pm fireworks (no pics of them due to camera limitations) … afterwards, we joined many others exiting the park (but even more people stayed till 2am, through the second (New Years) fireworks) …