The weekend with Rose turned out to be awesome. I worked all night Saturday night (10pm-11am), then headed straight to the airport from work on Sunday morning. The plane was a small Cessna 402 which seats about seven. I was hoping I'd get to sit in the copilot seat, but that spot was given to an attractive blonde girl (go figure). I did end up sitting just behind her though, so I got to check out all the instrumentation and everything.

The pilot was really cool; you could tell he enjoyed his job. He made the trip at 1000 ft so we could see the cool scenery, and when we passed over pretty islands he would tilt the plane to give us a better view. I would have loved to take pictures, but my bookbag was locked in a locker in one of the wings. There's no such thing as carry-ons in a plane that small. Oh well, I'd just have to be sure to bring my camera on the plane on the flight back.

The pilot was very talkative, so I thought of asking him some questions I've had about flying etc, but he spent most of his time conversing with the blonde girl, and I didn't want to interrupt the macking. I was sleepy, but I was having too much fun looking out the window and watching him fly the plane and I didn't want to waste the experience sleeping.

I arrived in St. Thomas and met Rose at the airport. She looks similar, but her hair is quite different now, so I didn't recognize her at first. I hadn't eaten in 24 hours or so, so our first stop was food. She suggested a number of different delis and places like that, and I tried to find a way to ask if any of them had good options without meat, expecting to apologize for the inconvenience of having to work around my pickiness. Before I had the chance, though, she mentioned that she didn't really know how good the sandwiches were at any of these delis, because she's a vegetarian. That worked out well :) Apparently she has remained so since she started it back when we were all in high school.

With that settled, she took me to a little place called Ital Irie, which caters to rastafarians (of which there are many in St. Thomas). As such, all the food there was vegetarian, since the rastafarian religion dictates vegetarianism (I don't think I knew that). We had an interesting selection of stuff, including barbecued tofu and something unfortunately called "protein chunks." The latter was green cubes of chewy stuff and looked kind of like the vomit of a sick person, but it tasted good, if somewhat weird :)

After dropping my stuff off at her house, I met her boyfriend Kevin and we all went to a deserted beach accessible only by traversing a rough trail down the mountain in a 4x4. Once there, we met up with their friend Orin (or some homophone of that) and his girlfriend, and Kevin and Orin fished while Rose and Orin's girlfriend and I relaxed on the beach.

That evening we met up with Orin and his girlfriend again to watch Batman Begins. I made a valiant effort but I had been awake for 28 hours, so I ended up sleeping through roughly half of the movie, on and off. It wasn't bad, but it seemed every time I woke up, Batman was flying through the waterfall into his lair in that car. It looks cool and all, but surely there's a normal way in that doesn't involve flying through the air? It seems like it would get old fast. That's even worse than me having to endure the massive speedbumps of La Villa every time I get home.

I've always loved sharing music that I discover with others, but people are generally not very receptive to new music. Often when Andrés comes down for a vacation or something, I'll put on some cool new music I want to show him, but he usually asks that I put on something that he knows. Imagine my thrill, then, when on Monday morning Rose suggested, "Hey, do you want to drive around the island taking pictures, and you can hook up your MP3 player to the car and show me cool music I've never heard?" She then suggested that we go out with her friend Jeff on his sailboat that evening. Ach. It's like I was in a Skinner box and she was pushing all the buttons at once. :)

So we did just that, and then went out on the sailboat. Jeff is a cool guy. He's got a computer installed in his boat, much like my carputer, except in addition to being wired into the sound system to play MP3s, his is also tied into the GPS and steering system and has charts and can be used for navigation and autopilot. The bookshelves on his boat are filled with Neal Stephenson and FreeBSD books, and the boat's fridge is filled with Guinness. I like this guy.

Jeff and his girlfriend Allison and Rose and I sailed out to St. John, about 40 minutes away, and watched the fireworks at sea. We anchored about 2-300’ away from the boat from which they were launching the fireworks, so we had a front-row seat. It was very cool.

I also got to ask him all kinds of questions about sailing. I'm definitely going to look into the sailing classes they offer in the San Juan harbor. Even if I don't get to the point where I actually own a boat, I love knowledge in general and it'd just be cool to have some knowledge of sailing in the bag alongside helicopter flying and automotive repair.

On Tuesday morning, I set my computer transferring a bunch of music to hers and then we headed out to see more of the island and take more pictures. We also stopped by the music store and got new guitar strings so I could restring her acoustic guitar. After stopping by the house to pick up my laptop and do the guitar, we headed to the airport and said our goodbyes. It was a short trip, but very fun, and I feel satisfied. Hopefully I can find a cheaper way to get over there, so I can do this more often. I can't afford $204 plane tickets every time, but if I could find a way to get there for like $100-120, that would be more feasible. I seem to remember only paying about $80 for our plane tickets when Andrés and I went out there like five years ago.

On the flight home, I made sure to get my camera out of my bag before they locked it up in the wing, but circumstances conspired and foiled my plans. This time I was told to sit up in the copilot's seat, and I thought, "perfect!" When I got there, though, this businessman guy had sat there. I explained that I had been told to sit there and he said, "I'm a pilot too, so it's better for me to be up here than you." The pilot said, "It's OK, I can handle it," but the businessman didn't get up, so I sighed and sat behind the pilot.

This pilot seemed much less friendly and clearly took little pleasure in his job. He kept his headset on the whole flight, and took the plane up to 3500’ rather than flying low to give us a better view. To be fair, the weather was kind of crap anyway, so it probably would have been rough flying down lower. Still, I wished I had had my camera the first time around. Oh well, hopefully there will be another trip soon, and I'll have another opportunity then. Andrés wants to try and go out there when he comes down next month, and I imagine we can make that happen.