There is a unusual custom here that every morning several townspeople bring their horses to the beach and make them swim. The horses don't really seem to like being made to swim either. They require a lot of coaxing into the water, seem pretty unhappy when they're really made to swim, and they groan, whinny, nicker, and blow the whole time they're swimming. I haven't talked to anyone who knows why they make the horses swim. Buzz's hypothesis was to help rid them of ectoparasites. I like to think of it as the St. Croix Water Polo team.

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We took a tour of the Cruzan Rum distillery today. The first part was a 1950's era multimedia display: they had a recording of a narrator reading a script about the rum-making process and a board with colored plastic insets that would light up as the narrator talked about various components of the process. Afterwards, we were led to the factory to see the mixing vats, the fermentors, the various stills (3 stills plus two more that remove particular impurities), the storage warehouse (the rum ages from 2 - 20 years in oak barrels), and the bottling plant. Afterwards, they took us back to the beginning and let us try a few samples. I tried the "single barrel" rum, which was as smooth as good scotch. I also tried the rum cream, which was as good as Bailey's. We bought a few bottles to bring home. You can take home 5 bottles duty free -- six if one of the bottles is Cruzan rum. We'll probably only bring home three.

The tour guide was interested to learn that we were down there studying mongooses. She said that once there was a bounty on mongooses of $0.25. Her grandfather caught mongooses to get the bounty, but then hit on the idea of raising mongooses for the bounty. Apparently her grandmother had different ideas regarding them scheme and put an end to them once she learned about them.

This afternoon, we drove through the "rainforest" -- not really a rainforest, but a forested mountainous region of the island. Afterwards, we went to Cane Bay where Alisa and the boys went snorkeling. Cane bay is famous for "the wall" -- about 150 yards out, the bottom drops off suddenly into a 3000ft trench. I got sunburned enough yesterday that I decided to stay out of the sun, so Lucy and I just sat in the bar and drank beer. Alisa and the boys swam and played in the surf for a couple of hours, though.


StevenBrewer