Antsy Pants

I’ve been a bit antsy lately. I think I’ve decided that seven months is my maximum limit for being on a 50 square mile island before I start doing the pee-pee dance in my brain. Unfortunately for my island fever, I do not have plans to leave Samoa until October 9th. So in an attempt to come up with ways to restore equilibrium to my psyche, Andy and I decided to take the weekend off and go be tourists at the beach. (Did I mention that we live on a beautiful island where you can go stay in a small hut on the beach for the weekend?) We packed our backpacks and jumped on an insanely overcrowded bus, that happens to be driven by my Samoan brother (small country), and headed east for Lalomanu. We spent the weekend eating ridiculous amounts of food that other people cooked for us, laying around and reading, snorkeling, and napping. We actually even sprung to go out on a boat for a snorkel trip which is way out of our price range but was really cool- we got to snorkel around the edge of an underwater volcanic crater and see turtles and eagle rays and all kinds of stuff that we don’t usually see when we snorkel off the coast. Plus we got to be on a boat. (You’d think, living on an island, that boats would be rampant here, but in fact unless you count the ferry to and from Savaii it’s quite difficult to manage to land yourself on one.) And then on Sunday in the pouring rain we jumped back on the bus and two hours of butt-bumping on uber-comfy wooden bench seats later, we were home and ready to start our week. It was great. We were gone for something like 48 hours but it was quite revitalizing. It was also kind of fun to play tourist, since everyone assumed we don’t live here. And just as a souvenir, to make sure I remembered our little vacation long after it was over, I brought back fleas with me that are now happily cohabitating my bed :)