{"id":151908,"date":"2013-03-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gracious-khorana.45-76-20-142.plesk.page\/anegada-virgin-gorda-the-british-virgin-islands\/"},"modified":"2023-06-26T17:13:45","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T17:13:45","slug":"anegada-virgin-gorda-the-british-virgin-islands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/2013\/03\/anegada-virgin-gorda-the-british-virgin-islands.html","title":{"rendered":"Wander Guide | Anegada & Virgin Gorda, The British Virgin Islands"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Every time I sit down to write I get stuck. It\u2019s spring. It\u2019s snowing. I was gone all winter. It was really weird and cool and I did neat stuff that I\u2019ll tell you all about. Later. After all that business of winter, which was hard work, we ran off to the end of the earth, to Anegada in the British Virgin Islands together. With nothing between me and Africa but sea, I read a book. A real book. I haven\u2019t read a real book in ages. Always blogs, cookbooks, snippets and bits. Here and there. Because I won\u2019t give myself the time to read a book, which is something I very much love to do. But I just sat on the beach beneath a straw hat and read Gabrielle Hamilton\u2019s Blood, Bones, and Butter<\/i>. It was grand, and we ate grilled spiny lobster, fresh out of the sea with a machete to it\u2019s head, every. single. night. We kept a room at the little Anegada Reef Hotel<\/a>, and every morning we walked down the beach to Pam\u2019s Bakery and ate fresh baked cinnamon rolls with free coffee by the hyaline water. And during the day we ate local fish with tons of bones in creole sauce and largely subsisted off of conch fritters and virgin frozen drinks, Pi\u00f1a Coladas and\u00a0Daiquiris and banana coconut drinks with lots and lots of fresh nutmeg. I put hot sauce on whatever I could & tied the stems of maraschino cherries into knots with my tongue in a very non-sensual absent minded way.<\/p>\n

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He wore slacks and a blazer on the beach, beneath an umbrella always, reading Romantic poetry and Carl Jung. Essentially he did what he always does but with more sand and water around him and me so very happy. He tried to swim once. It was endearingly funny in a tragic way as he stumbled out of breath on the dead coral heads. He can swim fine, but still he\u2019s like a fish out of water but the opposite of that. Part of why we\u2019re going to Ireland (we\u2019re going to Ireland in May) is because I feel I owe him a drabber climate after he so graciously went to the beach with me which is, I assure you, not his element. We smeared SPF 110 on each other every morning, and went to bed early every night.<\/p>\n

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Our days were spent at Loblolly Bay watching the waves crash in furious monotony on the reef for nothing. We got coconut pie at Dotsy\u2019s Bakery in the settlement, and I took hundred of photos of everything everywhere. We sat up nights talking to Bozo, a local fisherman & engineer extraordinaire, about the right way to clean intestines for cooking and secret shipwrecks while the mast lights bobbed in the bay, and we rode in the back of the taxi driver Courtney\u2019s truck to pick up his son from school in the afternoon. The next morning he took us past the spindly \u201cgarbage cows\u201d (as the local calls them) gnawing on the shrubs and past where the road ends and turns to sand (which is really every where and quite often) on the backroads, behind the salt ponds where the flamingos live. The Anegada air blowing in your face as the truck bumps heavily along the sand roads smells of sea and sulfur, of cow shit, fuel, and grilled lobster. It\u2019s my favorite place on earth.<\/p>\n

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We came home. Work again. Only I felt stuck. Frozen. I could cook. I could snap photos. But I just couldn\u2019t write. Can\u2019t write. I think it\u2019s because there is so much, so much to say. That I can\u2019t say anything. I left this space on a strange note to leave a space on, a heavy note, but a hopeful one. I thank everyone, every single person for their comments, and I\u2019m sorry I couldn\u2019t respond to them all. I\u2019m getting back on it now that I\u2019ve returned to the internet realm. So I really don\u2019t know what to say to you all. I worked hard all winter, and I came home. I went to the beach. We\u2019re going to Ireland in May, and I turned the guest bedroom (which just really a repository for everything I didn\u2019t know what to do with) into an office\/studio, a real live room of my own to work and write in. I\u2019m going to get plants. Cacti. Succulents. Hearty things that don\u2019t mind my neglect. I\u2019m going to tape things I like to the walls and throw out all the old wedding photos that have been nesting in here like spiders. It\u2019s a sort of pale aqua room. I painted it that back in my early 20\u2019s when a pale aqua room sounded like a good idea. I\u2019m not really a fan of it, I\u2019m a fan of white everything now, but then I think strange, strange things like \u201cIt would make a good nursery color\u201d, and then I don\u2019t even recognize myself in the mirror. So I was away, then I went to the beach. I\u2019m going to go to Ireland, and I have a room and sometimes I think vague disturbing things about having children because. Because I\u2019m awfully happy and everything\u2019s wildly wonderful even when we\u2019re living off of nothing but flour, water, and yeast for a week because we maybe kind of spent everything on plane tickets. I\u2019m not going to have babies, so no one freak out. But for the first time I think my brain and body have evaluated my situation in life as hospitable to new life forms. And that\u2019s a great thing.<\/p>\n

So. Hi! I\u2019m back. If you haven\u2019t seen it already and you\u2019re in the mood for more food less beach (I wouldn\u2019t blame you), check out my piece for Food52\u2019s \u201cHalfway to Dinner\u201d feature, One Loaf of Bread, 6 1\/2 Dinners<\/a>. I\u2019m very excited about it and still quite flattered that they asked me to in the first place. Also, since we\u2019re currently broke due to what you\u2019re staring at living off of bread is something we\u2019re adept at. I\u2019ve been cooking away these past few months (contrary to popular belief, my own included, things that aren\u2019t on the internet are still real), and I made you some cookies (chocolate, salty, spicy cookies\u2026) which I\u2019ll share in the morning, and I even have pizza and some ugly tortellini and pretty Irish brown bread and a very 80\u2019s looking salad I might share in the near future. Who knows! But tonight I\u2019m sharing these photos, photos are of my vacation, like one of those slideshows someone would have done in the 80\u2019s in their wood paneled basement after a dinner party. At least I think people did that. I don\u2019t know. I was a baby eating crayons or something back then.<\/p>\n

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Every time I sit down to write I get stuck. It\u2019s spring. It\u2019s snowing. I was gone all winter. It was really weird and cool and I did neat stuff that I\u2019ll tell you all about. Later. After all that business of winter, which was hard work, we ran off to the end of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152861,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1705,98],"tags":[768,769,18,770,771,772,93,417,773,51,97,774,775],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151908"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}