We take a deep breath.

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Our first move after Mia and Greg left was to check out of St. Lucia and head north to Martinique. We had to return on the 9^th to put the Fish back in the marina and fly to Denver for a few weeks, but we were ready for a change of scenery, and Martinique is only 20 nm away. We found anchoring off St. Anne, which is in the large bay thick with boats outside the even larger, denser Le Marin anchorage and marina. Le Marin is a popular charter base and boasts an excellent chandlery and a couple of very decent, relatively affordable supermarkets. It was nice to find some good French wines for reasonable prices, as well as delicious French cheeeeese, Gromit.

We took our haul and went up the coast a couple of hours to Anse d’Arlet, snugging in on a patch of sand a little ways off the quay. A beautiful beach lined the bay, and the town offered cute little beach bars and restaurants for the throngs of tourists. We most enjoyed our snorkeling. Almost as soon as we got in the water off the boat, we saw turtles snacking on the seaweed beds below us, and a host of colorful fish that seemed to inhabit a broken-down fish trap on the bottom near our anchor. We saw the same fish – including a lionfish – every time we looked! We swam to the swimming zone off the beach a few times and snorkeled along the rocky shore out along the side of the bay. The zone was crowded with people but the marine life was interesting, and we saw several varieties of fish and corals new to us. It was a pleasant place to spend a week, and it served the purpose we needed it to.

Back in St. Lucia, we left the Fish in the Rodney Bay marina and made our way south to the airport. On the way we learned that our flight to Charlotte was delayed by a day due to a large winter storm targeting the area, and we felt lucky to find a little room to spend the night in close to the airport in Vieux Fort. Peter stayed in Charlotte to spend a few nights with his family there and I changed my flight and continued straight to Denver. My 91-year-old father had gone into hospice two days earlier, and I badly wanted to see him before he died. Much of my time the next 5 days was absorbed in spending his last days with him, and then with all my siblings managing both the emotional, logistical, and legal follow up that comes with a parent’s death.

Meanwhile, Denver was cold. We stayed with Peggy at first, then worked with movers to take our remaining belongings out of storage and put them all in a large, unused room in our home’s basement. We then pulled out linens to make up the sofa bed and camped out for two weeks in our otherwise empty house. (I’m happy to report that it has since been rented!) Since we’d numbered all our boxes and had a spreadsheet with the contents of each, it made sense to me to put the boxes in numerical order. Maybe I was in denial and needed a distraction? I spent hours rearranging boxes in the basement…and twice that on muscle relaxants and buckets of Advil. Totally worth it. The visit was the perfect length to reconnect with family and friends, love on and then begin to grieve my father, stock up on goodies to take back to the boat (Hellooooo, Cracker Barrel Mac & Cheese), and enjoy the difference in seasons. Did I mention it was cold in Denver?

UP NEXT: Dark Days in Martinique