It is quite beautiful here! We pulled in on Tuesday morning, and after a night of being in the inner parts of the ship I decided to go out and get some sun and fresh air. I was blown away with the beauty I saw as I got to the outer deck. The waters are a beautiful turquoise and the hillsides are filled with lush vegetation. There are several homes nestled so perfectly in the sides of the hills that they look like they grew out of the earth and found their way to right where they are supposed to be. I heard that Oprah has a home here. I wonder if she'll adopt me?...

The first day was a busy day for some of us and a less busy one for the rest. The first day of arrival into the various country's are filled with teams heading to shore to 'catch' our gear. Meaning the pallets that were built to go to shore are HELO'd in and a team needs to retrieve them and store them in the appropriate locations. I have been on the past two retrieval teams so this time there was a different crew. They set out around 0930 in hopes of being back by early afternoon...but we all know how plans sometimes fall through right? Well unfortunately the pallets didn't start landing on shore until well after 1600. So all this time goes by and the poor crew was waiting and waiting. It wasn't only our crew, EVERYONE had to wait. Our guys finally got back around 1930. Bless their hearts. I felt bad.

Yesterday was our first performance. It was opening ceremony day too. We set out kind of late in the day. 1045. We made our way up to the CASREC for muster and then headed up to the lifeboats to lower us down to the hospitality boat that would take us to shore. Before I go on about my day, I have to talk about the whole lifeboat/hospitality boat deal. When we first started the trip, we had a 'plank' that we walked on to board the hospitality boat. This worked out great that is until the water started to get VERY choppy, making entering and exiting the boat very tricky. The latter part of Haiti and all of DOMREP was absolutely terrifying as far as getting on and off the hospitality boats. The boats, which are side by side, both rock horribly and violently. While one boat may sway backward and forward, the other one may sway right to left....they continuously slam into each other while water is gushing making everything slippery. The way I felt when I got on and off the boats was that all of the meanest animals, reptiles and sea life i.e. SHARKS were all trying to jump up at the same time and gnaw my legs off! Thankfully here in Antigua, we have a dock and don't have to do the boat exchange....hopefully it will stay this way for the rest off the trip....my blood pressure goes up when I have to do the transfer. So anyway back to the day yesterday. We got to the site at around 1115 or so and started setting up though our performance wasn't until 1600. The brass guys had to play at the opening ceremony so that's why we got there pretty early. I saw a little pet goat. It was cute...and his pal was a dog. They palled around the whole time we were there and they made me smile. We finally got to our 1 hour performance and it went well. We had a small, intimate crowd that seemed to like the music...We loaded up and headed back to the boat. I chilled out the rest of the night and went to sleep fairly early. 10.

Today has been pretty low-key. We started the day with rehearsing some new tunes...woo hoo! Tonight I plan to go to ZUMBA which is an awesome dance cardio class. I'm gonna get my SWEAT-on! Eww sorry...

Thanks for stopping by,

Keisha