Haulover Point

We didn't take sunrise or sunset photos from Middle Caicos.  They tend to be spectacular because those islands face the trade winds and open Atlantic.  That makes for a lot of cloud formations. Sunshine and clouds often make good  photos.  We, however, were in an area sheltered by thick, towering Casuarinas trees along the beach to both the east and west of us. This means that  both sunrises and sunsets were blocked from view.  Great for sleeping in, not so great for sunrise photography. We'd have had to get up before dawn and scurry out to the beach and back through the mosquitoes like Usain Bolt barefoot on a bed of coals.  We normally refer to those dusk and dawn times as being "bug:30"  But all is not lost.  La Gringa just got a bunch of really nice photos  from here at the house.  At least, I think they're nice.  Yes, yes, I am admittedly biased, but then again I've sure judged   a lot of sunrise photos.  I prudently promise not  to preach peremptorily  about  portraits of a potentially perfect picture of a piece of paradise. Nope.  Even if it was partially peeking prettily past purples and pinks during a photogenic period. 

What do you think?  About the photo I mean. Not about those ridiculous sentences that I hope generated at least one small sunny smile among a growing groundswell of groans.   C'mon.  Admit it.   As my grandfather used to say, this is a good 'un:

That first morning in the beach cottage found us surprisingly well rested. No bites. No scorpion surprises. First nights in a strange room and bed are rarely restful for me. I'm a light sleeper to begin with.  Headlights sliding soft shadows silently across a windowpane will often wake me.    But that didn't happen here.  No lights. No strange noises.  We cranked the windows down,  the air conditioner up and fell asleep smiling at the thought of the starving and frustrated  bugs outside the walls. There just aren't enough mosquitoes within flying distance to pick a lock or turn a doorknob.   I suspect the crows could do it, but they're above all that. I know I might sound a bit overzealous when it comes to mosquitoes.  That's because I feel persecuted.  Hey, there's a P word I missed.  I seem to be their preferred (and another!) meal ticket.  Put a hundred people in a swamp with a dozen mosquitoes, and I will be the one that ends up slapping  my ears, wrists, and ankles while everyone else gets a big laugh out of my self abuse. I  must look like I've lost all muscle control during a hand jive contest.  I've heard that slightly warmer body temp attracts them. A Jamaican friend (Bernard of the Boatyard) told us it meant I had a vitamin C deficiency.  He might have something there.  La Gringa rarely gets bitten, and she goes through a lot more limes and orange juice than I do. She might have to avoid open flames but she's never gonna have to worry about scurvy.  Honestly.  It's not uncommon for me to have a dozen bites while other bait sitting near to me has none.  People should invite me to cookouts just for that alone.   Plus the entertainment value of my slapstick.

It didn't take long to rustle up some breakfast in the cottage's well-equipped little kitchen. Bacon and eggs, in fact.  Not our usual breakfast in these days of health consciousness.  But hey, we were on vacation.  What better excuse to eat like you're young and immortal? A veritable heart attack on a plate if you believe the diet gurus. Besides, the North Caicos grocery store where we bought our provisions isn't exactly a tofu, vitamin and wheat germ kind of establishment. It's not Whole Foods.  For what it's worth, I doubt you'll find any fern bars on North or Middle, either.  It's just not a night club kind of environment.  Or shopping.  Or movies.  The beach was out for now. We're really not sit-on-the-beach-and-vegetate  vacationers, anyhow.  We get bored easily and we'd rather be moving.  If left to myself on a nice beach I'll end up building sand castles and seeing how long I can keep the waves from destroying them.

 We went by Mr. Alton Higgs' home near the village of Lorimers.  Mr. Higgs is a well-known 'bush doctor'.  He uses local plants and herbs to treat a variety of physical symptoms. Chef  Devon Forbes swears Mr. Higgs can heal anything with bush medicine. Another friend, Capt. Jimmy Lee, tells us the same thing.  I wonder if he does knee replacements.  Mr. Higgs apparently also has a few  political opinions,  if his choice of driveway ornaments is any indication.   I snapped a quick photo of his locally famous driveway as we went by, but then realized that it just didn't do it justice.  

There's too much here to fit into one photo. I'd have to string several of these together for you to get an idea of Mr Higgs' choice of media.  And I wanted to show it to you.  He put a lot of work into this.  And you can get an idea of some of his concerns. I didn't want to get out of the vehicle and find out how fast ten thousand mosquitoes could pump, so we just did another one of our drive-by videos.  Check out the face carved into the tree, if you can spot it there above one of the unpaid political announcements.

This is Middle Caicos version of a Fox News editorial:



I did a search for information on Mr. Higgs, and found an excellent article written by  Sara  (Kaufman) Forbes that was published in the local tourism magazine.  It's a good piece about Mr. Higgs and the history of Middle Caicos in general.  If you're interested, click on this link for a nice write up and some photos.

I've mentioned that the paved roads on Middle and North are in really good shape compared to Provo.  I think maybe that's because they get very little traffic. And not much of that is heavy commercial traffic... there's nothing really being built. The only changes that we noticed since our last trip were that the trees and brush are slowly encroaching out into the lanes.  It's not really a problem to swerve into the other lane to miss the odd tree.  In a day of driving around Middle, I would guess we saw maybe three or four other vehicles at most.  Over about six hours.  I suspect you could walk down the middle of  this road without a problem.  You could inline skate from one end of the island to the other down the center line.  It would probably be okay to take a nap if you limited it to couple hours..

I don't think there are as many abandoned structures on Middle as we see on North Caicos, but that would make sense.  North is much more populated, with well over a thousand residents.  I'm not sure whether to label this abandoned yet, or not. The sign says that it's a government dental clinic. It's blurred because this was taken from a moving car window.  I was tempted to drop in for some local gossip and a few root canals, but alas, it wasn't open on this particular weekend.

It doesn't appear to me that those weeds on the steps have been disturbed by anything any time lately.  certainly not by anyone with a paintbrush. I'm suspecting that the funding for this clinic dried up about three years ago. Any need for emergency health care  in these remote islands is something that would concern us a little if we moved over here.  Especially me, being old, decrepit and accident prone.  Don't want to have to go all the way to Provo to get something sewn back on, or restarted. Mr. Higgs might be the closest viable option.  And I am pretty sure our health insurance would have some issues with that.

There were at least two fairly large plantations in operation in this area in the late 1700's. Wade's Green on North, and Haulover Plantation here on Middle.  So there are probably some fairly interesting ruins scattered about if one knew where to look.    It wouldn't take much neglect for the weeds to totally take over and hide a place. Another year and I'm not sure we'd be able to even see this one from the road.

I know that I've already used this  following map in the previous post, but it's serving as a reference to where some of these photos were taken.  It's not totally accurate in that it doesn't show some of the old tracks and trails that a proper map would have, but it's quite frankly about as good as anything else I have been able to come up with.   There just does not seem to be much in the way of documentation for many of these islands.

The cottage we rented is located just about under the word Beach in Bambarra Beach on the map....... I think. We drove through the settlement of Lorimers, which is labeled Lorimers Village on the map.  It's not a huge village, and I read that the population is reported to be fifteen people.  We didn't see any of them on this holiday weekend Saturday.  Must have been something going on somewhere else.  It's the kind of place that could get away with putting all their city limit signs on the same post.

The area  between Lorimers, Farm Creek Pond, and Haulover Point was once known as Haulover Plantation.  Dr. John Lorimer owned the plantation, and the land, and the village and the people.   That all came to an end in the 1800's, but some of the ruins and the place names are still with us.  The ruins won't be around forever, but I don't think they're in any danger of being bulldozed under for another resort any time soon.  Not here.   If you look at the right side of the map you'll see Joe Grant's Cay.  There has already been at least one false start trying to develop that island into a resort. Since the TCI government has granted a permit to develop it once already, this would be my best guess as the most likely spot for future development in the next few years.  I suspect that this could be a good thing for the people of Middle Caicos, if economic opportunity is important to them.  A fancy resort full of paying customers would do wonders for the infrastructure between Joe Grant's Cay and   Sandy Point on North.  It might also incorporate a harbor or marina of some kind, and that would help enormously in the development of Middle Caicos.   Assuming, of course, that Middle Caicos wants to be developed.
While I'm talking about the names of these places, I should tell you the origins of the other two villages here on Middle.   Conch Bar is the main one, with the majority of the remaining 165 people not living in Bambarra or Lorimers.  Conch Bar was named after a popular fishing spot just offshore here.  Daniel's Cafe is located in Conch Bar, and there are some  photos of that  in the previous post.  If you look at the north west corner of Middle Caicos on the map you'll see a place called Juniper Hole, and Crossing Place Trail.   We haven't been there, yet.  We plan to take that hike one of these days.   The Crossing Place Trail has long been on my 'bucket list' for the T.C.I.    This was the old trail people used to walk from Middle Caicos to North Caicos. The dirt road bordering the beach is also part of the old path system.   The better road, used by the plantation owners in their carriages, was called the Kings Road. That's now the paved road.  I was going to try to go into more detail about all of this, but there are a number of good write-ups online you can go to if you are interested in this stuff.   Much better than my measly and uninformed version. One write-up that I'd recommend is here.

Anyhow, as good as the Kings Road is, we know that all good things must come to an end and this one does at Lorimer's Landing.  We've posted some photos of this area in the past here on the blog, but we like to revisit these places from time to time to see if anything's changed since our last visit.  And well labeled.  Remember we drive on the other side of the road here.

The boats at the end of the road ramp have changed, but the ramp is still the same.   When I was looking at this ramp, keeping in mind that we've made this trip specifically with an eye to the possibility of living here, I was wondering what I'd have to do to launch either the Hobie Tandem Island or the skiff here.  At first I thought 'well, I'd just gently move that power boat out of the way for a few moments while I........"  etc.  Then I took a closer look.

This boat hasn't been motoring for a while.  There's no steering, wheel, ignition, no fuel lines, no propeller, and someone has piled rocks up behind it to keep it from drifting away.   I guess there isn't much demand on the ramp here.

I am encouraged by the fact that one can leave a Yamaha 50 horsepower outboard here without worrying about it developing 'legs', if you know what I mean.    That wouldn't happen for long on Provo. Not too many other places, either.

Unlike some of the abandoned structures scattered around the bush, this spot obviously gets cared for.  The wood is painted and the roof is in good repair. There's not a speck of trash on the ground.  I know there's a fine line between trash and flotsam,  but this place is neat and clean. I suspect this is a popular fishing spot.  And if the entire population of Lorimers all showed up here at the same time....

There's more than enough seating for all fifteen of them. Even if each of them brought a friend from North.

I bet you don't see many roadside picnic areas like this where you live.  Quite an eclectic collection.  We decided to step off the pavement for a few minutes and take a closer look.

I was particularly interested in the hammock-style seat.  I thought this to be a pretty slick use of a scrap of fishing net.

The artiste has taken a couple of lengths of salvaged aluminum tubing, netting, and polypropylene line and made a very safe, sturdy, and comfortable place to relax.  I like it.  I'm wishing I had a place to build one of these, but we don't have trees this big where we live.

And yes, of course I had to try it out.   And while I suspect I am a few sizes larger than whoever designed this, it's plenty comfy.

I sure hope y'all appreciate that photo.  Because the logistics of climbing in there for that little experiment exposed just a few inches of the back of my leg up beyond where I'd laid up my primer, base and top coats of insect repellent. See that little unprotected gap between the hem of my shorts and my leg?   Don't let yourself ever do that here during mosquito season.   I mean it.  In the two minutes or so I took to try out the hammock, several shrieking  platoons of bloodthirsty mosquitoes managed to plan and stage a successful assault on me.   (Think of a  Lilliputian Land Rush using scale Messerschmidts and drilling equipment.)  Fortunately, they stopped as soon as they got to fresh meat and didn't do any further exploring.  They must have absolutely loved that tender white skin, because by the time I limped back to the car my butt felt like a 3D topographic model of the Andes.  Except with pain.

My brief experience at a lower spot in the food chain drove me back to the car before I thought to try out this amusement ride in the little shelter.  Maybe some other time.

We like this spot.  It's far and away less scenic than other parts of Middle, but it's also off the path a bit. Before we left the breeze started to pick up a little.  If I had only waited for half an hour I could probably survived the hammock feeding frenzy episode unscathed.  Live and learn.



From Lorimers Landing we decided to head over to see if there has been any further development in the Wild Cow Run area of the island.   You can find that on the map too.  There's nothing complicated about navigation here.  We'd spent a lot of time here three years ago, looking at a four acre property that our friend Preacher had an option to buy.  The government has set aside this area for tourism development and Preacher was thinking of a fishing lodge. We haven't read any news, or heard  anything about any development but we wanted to check, anyhow.  We also wanted to go take a look at one of our personal dream pieces of real estate near here,at Haulover Point.  We love that spot, and it's easy to fantasize about building a home there.   No way that's ever going to happen, but it's a nice dream.  We like nice dreams.  We sometimes even pick one and pursue it.  But ya gotta pick your battles if you want to stay in the game.  Is that a mixed metaphor?  I think so.

On the way  to Haulover Point we saw the sign and a little observation tower at the Field Road for Haulover Plantation.   We chanced a brief trip out to take a look, since we do have an interest in these things.  It doesn't look like this entrance gets a lot of  business.

We climbed up a little wooden observation platform that was up above the trees.  I wish I had thought to take a photo of it, mainly to impress you with our bravery in climbing it. I'll pay it the compliment of calling it a little rickety.  From the top of the viewing platform we could see across the over grown fields to where the old plantation's Great House is located.  La Gringa has the good telephoto lens on her camera and got this shot of the massive stone chimney sticking up above the foliage:

If you Google up 'images of Haulover Plantation, Middle Caicos" you should find a nice closeup photo of that ruin by someone who made the trip.   That chimney(above) is just over a mile away from the tower near the road.  We want to go see it but we'll come back in a few months and do it when we don't have to pack plasma in with us.

Now, this next shot wouldn't normally have been included in this post.  I was just snapping away, and saw the single line of utility poles stretching out, and thought maybe if the photo came out nice I could say something about this being the only way in, and how vulnerable the poles would be, and so on.   Obviously the photo isn't that great and I didn't say all those things... but there's another little story here.  As I was looking at the road, a single small vehicle went by with two men in it.  Kind of hard to miss. They were the only other people we saw all morning.  But what struck me as strange at the time was that they clearly saw us standing up on the top of this little wooden tower taking photos.  I waved at them.   They didn't wave back.  I can't tell you how unusual that is, not only on Middle Caicos but on most of these islands.  Everybody smiles and waves here.  Certainly in response to someone waving at them first.   These guys didn't.  And I made eye contact with them.  I won't say it was an ominous sign, or that I was worried, exactly, but I did harbor a couple of thoughts playing 'what if'.  Ya know?  But they kept right on driving.  If anything, they sped up.    Most peculiar, Momma. (John Lennon).

We looked around, and  re-noticed some black smoke off in the distance to our east a few miles.  I write 're-noticed' because we'd seen this single column of smoke from Lorimers Landing earlier.  I thought someone was burning old tires or something.  Didn't think much of it.  It wasn't that much smoke, not a major conflagration, anyway.  So we continued on our way, fat, dumb and happy.   More on this story later.

As you can see, there's not much going on here, development wise.  The road looks pretty much the same as it did three years ago.  The bushes are crowding things a little, but that's the only change we could see. The power lines to nowhere are still waiting for customers with electric doodads to plug in, someday.



We saw a fiberglass mold for a boat hull, inverted at the side of the road.   I was a little bit surprised to see this out here.  It appeared be in pretty good shape, and certainly still usable.  In a mold like this it's the inside surface that's important.  That's where you lay up the fiberglass resin and cloth or matting  to build a hull.  It must have taken someone a fair bit of work to haul it out here and dump it by the side of the road.  I wondered why they bothered to go to that much trouble.  Then I wondered if perhaps someone was burning the corresponding pieces of this further down the road. There must be another mold for the deck, or liner, or console or something and burning fiberglass would explain the smoke we'd seen.   These were just passing thoughts, running through my head like usual.  Thoughts get loose in there sometimes and the echos are annoying..  I guess that's to be expected when you have that much empty space to play with.  La Gringa says I have the criminal mind without the intent.

This is a Google Earth image of Haulover Point.  You can see the ruins of two structures out on the point itself, as well as the little bay that I am assuming is where boats were 'hauled over' for hull repairs, etc. (Haulover Point and Plantation, of course).   Now, notice the mouth of the little bay.   This image is six years old.   We can report officially that as of last week, it doesn't look like this any more.  The beach is continuous across the mouth of the little bay, and the former bay is now a  lake.

That image has a lot of info on it that will help  the following photos make sense geographically.  You can see the trails and roads approaching from the west.  That's the direction back towards the Great House ruins.  There are what appear to me to be some ruins of wharfs or buildings just south of what I am calling the 'little bay', right at what would be the end of that sand path.  You can see some open fields for agriculture or storage or something, to the east of the ruins.   And you can see the swell running from the point into the slightly larger bay, just abeam of the ruins.  (Listen to me... using a word like 'abeam' to mean adjacent or alongside.  Am I salty, or what?)  If you've read some of the older posts here you'll already know we tried to get an aerial photography capability going with a helium balloon five years ago.  These sat images are helpful but  don't have nearly the resolution I could get from a hundred feet with a good camera.  We had to shelve the aerial idea because of the winds here.  (Need a blimp-shaped balloon with tail fins like Goodyear, but we only have a spherical one that wobbles wildly in wind.)  Okay, homework's done.  On with the story.

This was taken right at the very westernmost tip of the point.  Even though the day we were here was calm, there was still a nice swell running from that point to the beach.  You can probably hear the old surfer in me.

And I'd love to find a good safe spot to do some body surfing here.  This might be the place, when conditions are right.   A nice deserted beach of smooth soft sand.  It's also a nice right hand break forming up, although on this day the waves were only topping out a little over two feet, max.

The sand has filled in the open mouth of the little bay completely and formed that beach where there was an opening into the bay six years ago.     I strongly suspect this all happened during a few days in the fall of 2008.  September, to be exact, when we got two hurricanes in one week.  It's amazing how much it's changed.    If Google Earth ever updates the images of the TCI I'll have a field day comparing images of the landscape here before and after the storms.

This is the view across what used to be the open mouth of the little bay. Nice beach.  

It took us a few minutes to realize that this is what was once a boat slip.  It was dug out to a depth of probably about six feet.  It's located on what was the northern edge of the little bay. It would have been a great place to pull in a boat and tie it up safe from all but a northwest wind.  And we rarely, rarely get a NW wind here.  When we do get one, it typically only lasts a few hours while a storm system is moving through.

The main body of the original little bay is still there, by the way.  It's full of water, and just looks like an inland lake now.  It wouldn't take much to cut a canal from it back to the open ocean, if someone were so inclined. Reckon that might have had something to do with someone bringing in that  now rusted up pump over at Platico Point?   I feel like I'm filling in plot elements here.

This Nikon pocket camera I'm using these days has a pretty good panorama function and I was playing with that a bit.    I don't use these in the blog much because of the aspect ratio, just doesn't fit well.  Fun to play with, though.  Here's a 180 degree sweep of the area that used to include the mouth of the little bay:

And here's one more, from that mid point on, just to complete the collection.    Then we'll be done with panos in this post.   The camera will also do a complete 360 degree panoramic view, but the last time I tried to look at one I kept turning clockwise until I got dizzy trying to figure out where it started and stopped.   I would have fallen over except I'd augered myself into the beach past my ankles.  Now I just use the 180 degree option.

That view brings us up to the front of the structures here.  It's hard for me to tell how old these are without chipping some of the surface off, and I didn't want to do that.  I don't know if this is concrete over stone, or modern block.  Some of it is poured concrete, and it's holding up pretty well, so a lot of it is not that old.  Someone had some great plans for all this.  Another dream that ran out of gas before reaching reality, perhaps?  It must be depressing to get this far on a project potentially as nice as this one, and then not finishing it.

The other structure that you can see in the satellite images is a cistern.   While La Gringa was taking the photos of the building I was messing around with the cistern.  It's got about a foot of pretty yucky looking water in it.  I did take a photo, but decided there was not much use in posting it here.   We only post about a quarter of the photos we take.  For various reasons.   That water was some kind of ugly. With things in it that moved when they saw me.   The nervous part was that they were moving toward me.  I tell ya, it's different to experience life down in the middle of the food chain.

The cistern is poured concrete, too.   And we know it was also here before 2006.

I really liked the images of the building structure.   Something about the angles.  I tried playing around with some settings in the photo handling software we use.   This is supposed to look like a pencil sketch:

We'd read in one of the written descriptions that the outer shore here is a good place to beach-comb. You know that got our attention, big time.  My remaining original issue knee is giving me so much trouble we didn't walk very far down the shore,  it's pretty rugged for flip flops, anyhow.  But could see that there was some interesting stuff scattered here and there off in the distance.    You can't see the nice beach tucked up to the right behind the near point, here, but you can tell from the sat image what it looks like.  Or at least what it looked like six years ago..  That distant point is the one nearest the old open field in the sat image.   Nice piece of property, isn't it?

I confess that I hadn't taken many photos of Dooley the Dangerous at this point on this trip.  Part of the reason is that he was absolutely wired on this excursion.  He'd been in a kennel for three weeks while we were up in the Rocky Mountains playing with ATVs at 10,000 ft. and was more than ready to hit the beach again.  Consequently, he wasn't holding still for any photos.  He was too busy checking out potential hiding places for rodents.

When we left Haulover Point we decided to go on down past  Wild Cow Run and see if we could find the source of the black smoke that we had seen earlier.  We were no longer seeing the  smoke, but we knew it must be down this road. This is the road to Cedar Point, if you're following this on the map.  And it's the only road around.  And it's dead end.

And we easily found the source of the smoke.  It was  right alongside the road and still burning.  A couple of trees just next to it had burned, too. There's a lot of dry underbrush here, and a fire could easily get out of hand and burn acres of vegetation.  Kind of thoughtless, I thought. SOMEone had taken an entire spool of underground utility cable and set it on fire. The black smoke we saw earlier was the insulation burning off.    I don't know what the wire underneath is made of, exactly.  It looks like aluminum or some alloy.  Definitely not copper.

There are several empty spools of the same identical sort spaced along this road.  There are some junction boxes in place for under ground utilities.  The junction boxes are mostly already connected with underground cables.  I think this burned spool of cable was intended to continue that work.  Someone is going to be pretty upset that his cable got burned and stolen, I think.

Just to understand this, I just looked up the current price for aluminium.  Right now it's 87 cents US a pound.  Looking at that pile of cable from the burned spool, I'd guess there's maybe a couple hundred pounds there. So these guys burned that spool of utility cable to steal less than $ 200 worth of aluminum.  It's going to take them at least one more trip out here, and then they still have to haul this aluminum to whomever buys it.  All for $200 worth of metal.  Hardly seems worth it.  I wonder what that cost the owner to import and transport to this remote location.  I bet it was a lot more than $200.  A shame. Don't you just HATE thieves? We've had some experiences along those lines here, ourselves.

Well, after that, we'd had enough for one Saturday afternoon.   We needed to pick up some supplies for the cottage, so made one more trip over to North Caicos.  Nice to be back on a smooth highway again.   And it really is a nice road. And most of the people here are really nice, too.  Really. But not all of them.

You reckon those guys that didn't return my wave were in a hurry to get to the police station and report the burning cable?

Nah.  Me neither.

Oh, I almost forgot.  I have a little DIY project going on that I can use to close this post. I've just built this new little toy for the camera, called a 'slider'.

I know some of you have noticed the videography technique of 'sliding' the camera to pan a scene. It produces a 3-D effect by moving the foreground relative to a distant scene.  I'm still learning the technique, which requires this piece of hardware.  Naturally I have a much easier time building contraptions than I do learning techniques.  The old dog/new trick scenario, I guess.     But I did  build the slider.    I used a leftover length of aluminum tubing from my weather station installation, and some Starboard from that piece we found on the beach.   I cut the Starboard and drilled and tapped it without plans or drawings. And it shows. I intend to build a 'real one' if it works out.    The thing I built looks like this:

Please don't pay any attention to  my workshop environment.  I actually had to clean it up a bit to have room to build this thing.   The way it works is that we attach a camera to that moving slider in the middle and push or pull the camera along the length of these two rails while making a video. I threw this together as something to play with, to determine if it's worth it to buy a real slider.  I say 'buy' instead of build because to do this right I need one that's motorized. There's no way to do a good time lapse with this one.

We still have the GoPro camera although it's getting a little battered.  It would be good for a slow, time lapse slide.  I almost hate to show you this professional video because it's going to make my first efforts seem pretty puny by comparison, but here's a link to what one can achieve with a good slider setup.   If you watch that YouTube video in the link, it will explain what I'm wanting to do here much better than I can.    Think of what we could do with the clouds, water, driftwood, etc.

My first effort did have the effect of goading me into analyzing what composition components we need to do a better job.   From what I've seen so far, we need three elements in the composition.  We need a nice far field scene like the ocean, mountains, islands, etc.  We also need some good close field subject matter.  This could be a piece of driftwood, a shell on the beach,  gravel, etc. And the last bit that makes it work is something in the mid-field.  It helps if the mid field is not too cluttered.  The effect then becomes the juxtaposition of three visual elements, with the fore and mid fields moving in relation to the fixed far field.  Does that make sense?   It helps to be able to elevate one end of the slider and get a vertical component, and to be able to angle the slider so the camera is approaching the subject, or retreating from it.  Ok.  I'll shut up now.  If you've read this far you're probably a photography nut like we are and already know what I'm talking about.   That YouTube video explains it a lot better.  I already said that, didn't I. I also already said I'd shut up about it. Good point.  Thank you.

Here's my first try at it, and this is the video that led me to figure out why mine is crummy and what the pros are doing.



I now know that if we'd had a hunk of driftwood, or a palm tree about 20 or 30 ft. on the other side of the Buttonwood bush, it would have worked better.   We'll keep working on it.  I have an idea on how to improve the slider, too. I need to add some way to move that carriage other than by pushing it. I have an idea for pulleys.  I'll save that for the next post.  Might even get it built by then.

That little video clip is a sunrise, and I like to end these posts with sunsets.  I figure I owe you one, so here you go, again.  Another of La Gringa's photos:

Wow, seems like just last month the sun was setting over the main part of Providenciales to the right.  I guess time flies when you're having sun.

We have enough photos of our trip to Middle Caicos for one more post, and I think we saved the best for last.  We spent the next day at Mudjin Harbour.  That is definitely one of the most scenic places in the entire Turks and Caicos.  

To be continued....

Holiday Weekend

We decided to play tourist last weekend, so this post is about a mini-vacation over to the eastern edge of the  Islands.   It's a bit of a long read, by latest standards, such as they are.   No DIY, though.  Not in this one.   (But  I'll tell you right up front that the second half of this post is completely full of junk. Trust me.)

 We found ourselves with motive, weather and a three day weekend all at the same time.   We got an early start on  Friday, packed up Dooley the Doozy and a couple changes of clothes, and away we went.  Drove to Leeward-Going-Through, hopped on the TCI Ferry, and rode over to Sandy Point on North.   This Middle Caicos trip was a little different.  This time it was just the "three" of us (rounding Dooley up to a whole number) and we were totally on our own agenda.      No fishing trips, no visiting guests, no tasks,  no model boat races, no crowds.  Just Middle Caicos as it normally is when left alone.

We'd arranged to spend two nights in Bambarra, in a small cottage just steps from the beach.  We had plenty of time to look around, and didn't have to worry about rushing back to Provo before dark.    Whoops, almost forgot, and speaking of Provo and dark, here's a recent sunrise photo La Gringa took:

We went  to Middle to make one of our periodic check ups on a  long-running dream. Our decision in 2005 to build on Providenciales was based upon factors that don't all still exist in 2012.  And it was a close decision to begin with.  Things change. From time to time we like to both entertain and torture ourselves by thinking about packing up our life here and moving it along to another  adventure in island living. We've enjoyed  a lot of trips to Middle Caicos over the years, and have been asking  ourselves if that's a good place to relocate the whole kit and kaboodle, as it were.   This would be the Turks and Caicos equivalent of getting out of the "big city" and moving to a simpler life in the country.   That's the fantasy, anyhow.  I know some of you will be laughing at the thought of Providenciales being compared to a big city. You've got to think of it in our new scale, though. We'd be moving from a 38 square mile island of 24,000 people to a 48 square mile island with a population of less than 170.  I looked this stuff up on the official 2012 census site so it's probably pretty accurate.  Except any census of Provo probably skipped a whole lot of people living 'off the grid' and away from the pavement.  There are small shanty towns in the bush here, whether anyone official wants to admit it or not.

To put it in another perspective, Provo has a population density of 640 people per square mile.  Middle Caicos..... three and a half.    And they all know each other and everybody knows the half. Hey, you have to admit, this remote island idea has some attraction to some of us. Especially those who would actually move to a small island in the first place.    I think that surviving that  first big step of  living somewhere outside of your native country makes the thought of subsequent moves much less intimidating.    There are degrees of  remote, though.   I was going to say that I don't recall many people  wanting to move to a small crowded island.  But then I realized that  isn't accurate.  I do know people who would love the idea of living on Manhattan.  I know people who love Singapore. I'm sure there are some happy folks in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and lots of other places that I'd consider crowded islands.  You have to be wired a certain way to seriously entertain the idea of living on an island with only 170 people and only the barest of infrastructure.    SO, La Gringa, Dooley, and I decided to go spend a few days  on 'Middle' with the express purpose of deciding once and for all if we wanted to live there full time. 

We knew we'd get some good photos for the blog out of it, too.   That was our other justification: a break from boating and beach-combing West Caicos.  Well, we got enough photos for three blog posts.

We parked the truck at Leeward and took the TCI Ferry over to Sandy Point on North Caicos.  Susan Gardiner met us at the ferry with a Toyota mini-van that I had contracted for a couple of days.  We also ran into some old friends at the ferry terminal We know our way around pretty well, and navigation is pretty simple on islands with only a few roads, so we were shortly at our first stop for some refreshments.

La Gringa went into the store with a $20 bill for a bottle of water and  a diet Coke.  I was surprised when she came back out and asked if I had any smaller bills.  I did have, but couldn't understand why they didn't just change the $20.   There were at least a half a dozen people in the vicinity. I figured they must be doing a pretty decent business on a holiday weekend Friday.   La Gringa came out with the water and a Sprite.  No diet Cokes.  Ah well.  Welcome to smaller island life.  And this is North Caicos. Ten times the population of Middle Caicos.  We found out later, in a conversation with friends in the restaurant business, that this scarcity of small bills is actually a problem for the merchants here.  People come over for the day, hit an ATM on the way, and arrive with a pocket full of large denomination bills.    They tend to hand the cashier a $20 or $50 expecting change.  There just isn't enough small bills in the register to do that too many times before they're all cleaned out of $1's, and it's not easy to get small bills.  I'm not sure about this, but I think that the bank here got closed down some time back.   Hmmm.   Another factor inherent in living remotely.  Something I wouldn't have even thought about before, a difficulty in making change due to pure logistics.

We thought this sign was interesting.  Someone was enthusiastic about this half way point on the road.   Enough to build a frame, paint a sign, and pour two concrete footings.    It's a mile and a half to either settlement, and I'm sure that this is useful information to have.  I guess I just cannot imagine someone factoring in those distances in their decision as to which way they're going.

The fact that the sign is hand made doesn't mean that it's not official, by the way.  Just about all the signs we see over on this sparsely populated end of the nation are locally made.  There are no sign companies here. In this case, I am thinking that they were already planning ahead to the days when the budget got approved for the Police Department to add a cell phone.  Or maybe the Bottle Creek policeman wants you to ask him for his number.

If you ever visit the TCI, you'll probably notice abandoned houses scattered around.  That's been true on all of the inhabited islands that we've been to so far, which is all of them except South Caicos.  Since we were playing tourista and looking around, we saw quite a few of them on North and Middle Caicos. This one got my attention because it's wood framed.   That really dates a place here.  Hurricane Donna essentially wiped this place out fifty two years ago.   At some time during that rebuilding, the government changed the building code.  New homes and businesses were to built to a much stronger code.  We've been told that a house built to today's code should survive 140 mph wind gusts.  Of course you can build them stronger if you want.  But  wood frame homes are totally verboten.  So this one either survived Hurricane Donna in 1960, or was built very quickly thereafter before the codes changed.   There are not very many surviving wooden structures in the Turks and Caicos Islands from what we've seen.   This kind of looks like a 1960's house, doesn't it?

For comparison, most of the deserted houses on these islands are of much older construction.  It's hard to date something made of native stone and mortar.   Remember just a couple of post before this one we found native stone and mortar still holding together in a tidal action zone after 160 years.  I wonder how many hurricanes and tropical storms have battered this place in that time.

This one's been plastered over, but the door and window hinge designs are the same.   This is of some interest to me.  We often think about how we would build the next time around if we built another house here.  We think we've learned a few things.   And paying attention to how the old timers did it is one of those things we've learned.   I guess I could say that if it's lasted for a hundred years in this climate, it's worth some thought.

Obviously, this construction still accommodates more modern techniques where someone wants to use them.  For example, this building has a metal roof, rainwater collection system and mostly glass windows.

This next photo is not as good as it should have been.   It was actually taken on our way back to Provo on Sunday.  When we came by here on Friday from the other direction, we just got a quick glimpse of a man sitting on the top of a pile of gravel on the side of the road. I didn't have the camera ready and we were not sure what he was doing until we were already past.  His back was to us, the approaching traffic.   It wasn't until I saw that he had a hunk of limestone in one hand and a brick hammer in  the other that I realized where the  big pile of exceptionally clean gravel came from..  He was manufacturing gravel by hand.

He sits under this battered plastic tarp tied in the tree,  on a mound about eight feet high at the moment, and chips these rocks into that gravel.    I know you can't read the little sign but it basically says: 'For Sale' and has a phone number.  This is about as basic a small business as you can get.   I have no idea how much gravel he sells.  But if we were landscaping   I think we'd stop and talk to him.  How many places do you know of where you can get hand cut gravel?

This is the man's workspace.  Fresh air, sunshine, unlimited free raw materials, and probably the lowest overhead for miles.  We've got to come back and meet this guy some day.  He was here on a Friday, and not on a Sunday.   That's a start.

I wish we'd turned around on Friday and taken some photos when he was at work on his pile.  He was turning raw material into finished product.  I never seem to learn that we should never pass up an opportunity for a photo.  A specific photo can only be taken at that one exact moment in time..  After that, it's a different photo.  I'll just have to file this one under "things I wish I'd paid more attention to at the time".  It won't be alone.

Here's another nice old ruin on the best part of Bottle Creek.   What a great location.

We were noticing how so many of the old, small houses were located close to the road.   Then we realized that the old houses were built when there was only a path from house to house.  And the road followed the path.  So it runs through a lot of old front yards. Nobody wanted to be far from the roads.  Traffic is just not a problem.

Eventually we got to the eastern end of  North Caicos and onto the causeway that is the lifeline from Middle Caicos to the rest of the country.  It's even more important now than it was in the past.  Middle has no deep water harbors, and the airstrip is the only other way in and out.  We had not seen the causeway in at least a year, during which there has been another hurricane (Irene) and a few tropical storms. Sadly, it's in even worse shape than the last time we were here.  One more good storm should just about do it, I think.

We were slowed to about 5 mph in the rented minivan. It adds a considerable amount of time to the trip.   For the people who live on Middle Caicos and drive to North Caicos for supplies or for further travel, it's been an inescapable reality since September of 2008.  That was when Hurricane Hanna impacted us all here.

Hanna's storm surge tore the pavement up by undercutting it, and Hurricane Ike came by a week later to peel the pieces off and finish the job.  It's only gotten worse since then.

Here's a map of Middle Caicos showing the causeway and road structure of Middle.  If you've read this blog over the years, most of these places are already familiar.  As you can see, there are not a lot of options if you're staying on the pavement.   There are a number of dirt paths and roads in reality that don't show up on the official map, by the way.   We did get into a few of those on this trip.  Would love to have one of the Land Rovers over here for some serious exploring.

See that bump there on the north shore, between Conch Bar and  Bambarra Beach?  I know the printing is hard to read but it says "Platico Point".   I was scoping this place out on Google Earth, and a structure at that spot got my attention.   Most of this post is going to be about that.   But first some accommodation photos.

We stopped by Daniels Cafe in Conch Bar and picked up the keys to the small cottage we rented for the weekend.  We drove to the cottage planning to drop off our bags and open the place up to air out.  We're accustomed to open air living on our little hillside on Provo.   Well, we dropped off the bags okay, no problem.  But as far as opening the place up to air it out, well, it was not what we had anticipated.

The cottage is beautiful. Nice two bedroom, with a small kitchen and a big enclosed screen porch.  It's all just a few steps from Bambarra Beach.  We brought snorkeling gear with us, and an underwater camera.  We had plans to spend a big part of Saturday in the water taking photos and checking out the fish, conch, lobster situation.   We never got in the water.  We spent maybe five minutes on the beach. And we paid in blood.

Mosquitoes.

We probably had fifty bites each before we even realized we were under attack. This happened the moment we stepped outside the car.  We had our own individual, dedicated clouds of  bugs just waiting for fresh meat.  Which was us. I had bugs inside my sunglasses. Crawling in my nose. The high pitched whine in my ears could have been a leprechaun with a chain saw, but it wasn't. It was mosquitoes trying to find an artery.

Then they called in reinforcements.

I've traveled and worked in a few places.  Now please bear with me on this. I'll keep it short.... ish.  Grew up in Texas, and worked my youth on the US Gulf Coast. Worked both coasts of Central America, and have spent months up tropical rivers in the jungles of South America.  Southeast Asia.  Alaska. Canada.  And my point here is that these places are all well known for their mosquitoes. I've seen mosquitoes that needed runways.  I've seen clouds of mosquitoes with a combined tankage capacity larger than my blood supply.  That's worrisome when you think about it.    But until we stepped out of the car  here at Bambarra, I had never seen this many mosquitoes per cubic yard of airspace anywhere in the world.  We dashed to the house with the key ready, and rushed inside and slammed the door.   We looked at each other in shock as we listened to the frustrated little dive bombers bouncing off the windows. It was hot enough to bake bread on the kitchen table  inside that closed up house, but our first order of business was to stand there slapping each other silly.   It was a mutually agreed double assault. I think each slap probably killed twenty mosquitoes in the area of a hand print, and we had hundreds that rode in with us.  Little bitty mean ones. Fearless, voracious, persistent  crafty and evil little vampires.  After our slapfest we looked like a couple of victims of a Smurf drive-by paint ball attack.  In red.  These things define bloodthirsty.. We cranked up the air conditioners and tried cracking one window to let some of the heat out.    There were big glass sliding doors out to the screened porch, but  having learned from our experience just blithely hopping out of the safe rental car, we did a careful reconnoiter of the porch before venturing out there.  Good thing we did.  It revealed a tear in the screen, and thousands of hungry mosquitoes; quivering in anticipation..  We narrowly avoided another ambush.

They don't show up in the photos, of course, they're too small. But never mind that.  You all know what a mosquito looks like.   I did take some photos from inside the cottage, looking through the glass sliding doors (that we were now afraid to open) and the screened porch out toward the beach.  It's really a great location with the beach right there a few yards away.

I zoomed in on the view down the little path through the Casuarinas trees.   You can see that the reef is off a little distance out from the beach here.

You can also see some little flying black spots there in the foreground between us and the water. Blurred because they were moving so fast.  These are some of the billions of dragonflies that are feeding on the eleventy gazillion mosquitoes. Go, dragonflies, go. We love dragonflies. And lizards, and bats and birds and anything that will eat mosquitoes.  I wonder where our DNA ended up on this trip.  I think the large Cuban Crows we saw were probably the top of this food chain.  We saw them strafing the dragonflies that were gorging on the mosquitoes that were struggling into the air weighted down by their fresh load of Gringos blood.

And we got woken up by the Cuban Crows in the mornings.  It's an interesting start to the day, if you want to get up at dawn.  They actually make a pretty good alarm clock.  I can't imagine sleeping through it.   Have you ever heard one of these guys?

Turn your sound on and check this out:  (Just press the Play button)

And that really isn't a very good recording.   The ones we have here are a lot clearer,  sing a longer song, and sing it a whole lot louder.  I'll look for an opportunity to get a good recording next time we get a chance.  This one came from a birding blog.

We did take the path to the beach.  We sprayed each other down with a product called Deep Woods Off.   We know this stuff.  It's pretty good bug repellent. We laid on a good top coat.  Rubbed it everywhere we could reach.   Or so we thought at the time. We quick-stepped down the sandy path to Bambarra Beach, optimistically dressed in our swimming garb and carrying towels.   We were determined to try out this beach we were paying a premium rental for. We never made it into the water. By the time we got to the beach, the horde of flying assassins had discovered that the repellent was thinner in some spots than others.  I can only assume they were able to hold their breath long enough to drill through to the oxygenated blood below the skin holding the thin layer of repellent.   By the dozens.    We did find the can of repellent useful in squashing the smaller packs, but it was a losing battle on our side.  Now I think I know how George Custer must have felt after the first few arrows.   So we quickly ran back down the path, with me astonished at a new awareness of places where I should have put repellent.   Behind the ears.  The webbing between the fingers.   The bottoms of my feet.  Parts of my anatomy that  I had mistakenly assumed that my clothing would protect, if you know what I mean..  Tropical cotton was not enough,.  We needed Kevlar. With the optional inserts.

The cottage was very clean and well-equipped and nicely decorated.  It's adequate and comfortable.  Good enough.  We could tell it hadn't been used in a while, but this IS hurricane season here.  August, September and October are pretty dead in the tourism market.   Found a small scorpion trapped in the bathroom basin.   He couldn't climb up the smooth sides.  I noticed something  that had escaped my attention before.  Notice how this guy's stinger curves to the left?   The little barb and his tail are set up to sting to the right.

We thought we better take a quick look around.  And we only saw one other scorpion.  This one was in even  more of a predicament than the one in the basin.  He'd somehow gotten inside a plastic garbage bin in the bedroom. We puzzled over this one a bit. We finally chose to believe that he'd climbed up the wall and mistakenly lost his footing on the plastic.   Because the other alternative was that he'd dropped down from the ceiling and we quickly agreed that the weekend required us to believe that this was just not possible.  We're sleeping in this room.

But notice the stinger.  This one is constructed curving to the right, so that all  his stabbings are conducted to the left.   Is it possible that there are both left and right handed scorpions? English and French scorpions  maybe?  Anyhow, that was really the only issues with the cottage. We don't worry much about the scorpions, by the way.  We have been lucky not to have been stung so far, but we've talked to people who have and the word we get is that it's really no worse than a bee sting.   (Tell you what, I think I'd trade one sting for  five hundred mosquito bites if I had a choice.)  And they're not aggressive.  They'll run and hide from you if they have an escape route.

We talked to quite a few people about the mosquitoes and everyone was in agreement that they were the worst they'd seen in four years.   There were unusually heavy rains about two weeks before we got there.  We just happened to catch the hatch, I guess.  And to be fair, we've been to Middle Caicos a dozen times, at least.  We've spent all day sitting on a blanket on the beach here at Bambarra without a single bite.  We've walked the beach at Wild Cow Run with Preacher, and spent the day digging Froggy's truck out of the sand, without noticing any mosquitoes    We've been on a boat with Dolphus, while Keith was fly fishing for bone-fish here.  No bug problems.   So we know, for sure, that as soon as the drier weather shows up, the bug problem goes away.  I can't tell you exactly when that will be, but we know they're gone sometimes before the annual model sloop regatta  right here on this same beach in February.  And that's the best time of year to be here.   This cottage would be a really great place to spend a few days in February.  I'm guessing that the rainy season is the hurricane season, which is over in early November.  Give the low spots a month to dry out, and I'd say come visit Middle Caicos any time between Christmas and September.  Heck, this cottage even has a parking spot for visiting ex-wives.

That's a hand made broom from here on Middle Caicos, by the way.  Straw work is a specialty of some of the good people here.  Baskets, hats, brooms, and other things, made by hand the old way.

We decided to give the cottage air conditioners time to do their thing and we headed out for some sight seeing.  We also saw this as an opportunity to learn a little bit about living in a place like this. We decided to make a  grocery store run.  We needed some basic supplies, and most specifically another can of bug juice and a bag of ice to be sure  La Gringa had some for her rum.  She'd filled the trays in the freezer at the cottage, but we had no idea how long it would take them to freeze.  We decided to drive back to the last grocery store that we'd seen on the way down, and pretend this was a normal, grocery run.   The last store we remembered passing was in Bottle Creek on North Caicos.  The round trip took us two hours.   The main issue is the damaged causeway between Middle and North.  We've read that the government has approved repairs.  That will change things.  When it happens.  But at the moment, a bag of ice is a two hour round trip.

 Now, I've broken this weekend trip up into three segments for the purpose of this blog.  They're not in chronological order, but it shouldn't matter.   They're divided up by subject matters.  The next two posts should be more scenic and less complaining.

We started out several of our trips at Daniel's Cafe in Conch Bar.  Daniel and Sara Forbes run the restaurant , a real estate company, and the Middle Caicos Co-Op.   This is a good place to buy straw work and native arts.   Daniel's Cafe is right on the beach.

Daniel's is kind of centrally located for Middle Caicos excursions.  If you look to the east you can see the old coast road that follows the beach for much of this part of the island.  This is different from the very well paved road that runs through the middle of the inhabited areas.

Before I get too far off the subject, Daniel's is an excellent place to get native dishes.  We usually eat at least one meal here every time we're on Middle.   Most often it's lunch, but we've also had some nice dinners here as well.  And if he has advance notice, Daniel will arrange to have conch and grits for breakfast.   On the Saturday night we stayed over this weekend, we had spiny lobster tail, collard greens, roasted tomato, peas and rice (which uses beans instead of peas but that's another story) and a salad.  We also had a nice bread pudding desert.

Here La Gringa is talking to Devon Forbes, Daniel's son and the chef at the cafe.   Devon has fathered a new baby daughter since the last time we've seen him.  La Gringa was commiserating with him, explaining how life changes when you start having children.  Isn't that the understatement of the morning?

If you look west from the Cafe, you can see the water off the settlement of Conch Bar.   I'm calling these settlements instead of towns, because they just don't seem to get up to the level of a town. The buildings up on the hills overlooking the ocean in the distance are the Blue Horizons resort.  We were trying to decide whether to head east or west from here.    Finally, remembering the structures I had seen at Platico Point on Google Earth, we decided to head the other way and save Mudjin Harbor for when we had more time to spend there.

This is the feature that caught my attention on Google Earth when I was researching this place.  This is an old image, from 2006.   I was originally scanning the reef line looking for openings where we could get Twisted Sheets in through the reef if we wanted to come drop the anchor here for a few days.  So first I spotted that break in the reef.   Then I zoomed in and saw the structures on the beach.  My first impression was that it was some kind of a wharf or breakwater.   There are pieces of equipment scattered around the bush surrounding the road.  There is sand built up on the up current side.   I really wanted to know what this was, and if we could get the sailboat in.  So we had a destination in mind.   I think I do better when I have a specific goal.

This also shows you both the paved road ( which is in great shape, by the way) and the old sand road that follows the shoreline.  You can see some of the rough trails that are scattered here and there on the island.

Now, if any of our friends at Enterprise Rent a Car in the US are reading, relax.  This was NOT one of your cars.   The folks that rented it to us know where we're taking it, for the most part.    This is what the sand road along the beach turns into not far into the bush.   At least the branches scraped the mosquitoes' little drilling crews off the side windows.   I could still hear some of them working on the locks of the tail gate.  Thank goodness they don't have tools and  thumbs or we'd look like those dried out husks you find under spider webs by now.

We knew we were getting close when large rusty hunks of what was once very expensive machinery started showing up in the underbrush.

Here's another 'slide video' shot, using a car instead of the slide this time.   I'll try not to overdo this like someone who just discovered the zoom button.



We found the spot we were looking for.  Not that it took any great navigational skill.  This is what the place looks like from the west.  It's the part where the beach sand has built up. Makes it pretty easy to determine which way the long shore current runs, doesn't it.

This photo shows the break in the reef to the north.  It was that possible way in through the reef that first caught my attention.  Obviously, someone was able to bring some pretty big stuff in.  There's plenty of depth for our boat here.  Of course Dooley the Delinquent immediately sniffed every single piece of hardware and structure on location.  He always does.

If you examine that photo above you can see how this was all set up. Someone built a substantial concrete wharf right on the shore, and snugged barges up against it for on and off loading.  There are also a couple of big concrete blocks poured a distance away from this  main one.  They were used to run lines from the barge ashore to stabilize it.   A good plan, but it seems to me that somehow, things got left in place a little too long. Now, they'll remain in place for a whole lot longer.

I'm not entirely sure what this piece of equipment is.  I would guess it's a big centrifugal  pump. Maybe someone was planning to do some suction dredging.  That would make sense.  Dredging a harbor, or channel, or excavating a shipwreck.   I can think of several good uses for a big pump here to move water and sand.  My own opinion is that whomever started this wharf project should have built a breakwater to protect it first. Waves coming through that hole in the reef must be a real factor in working close to shore here.   It was a calm day when we were there.

I did snap a photo of  this thing, to get the name.  Just in case anyone cares.  

This is a nice stainless steel tank.  It was in such good condition, I was wishing I had some kind of a practical use for it.  A submarine?  A hot tub?   Bomb Shelter?  Boat? Well casing?  A camping trailer? Now there's an idea.  We could put this on a chassis with wheels and build a TCI version of a stainless steel Airstream travel trailer.  Because I can tell you up front, the aluminum (or aluminium) version wouldn't survive long here. Oh well.  It looks like junk but  I suppose it belongs to somebody somewhere.  As I used to tell my kids when they were growing up, you might not know who it belongs to, but you do know it's not yours.

I know this would be an insanely long trip to find our traditional yearly "Christmas Stump" in a couple of months, but if we DID want to find one, I got a candidate already located.

I'd be a bit surprised if that tree is still there after Tropical Storm Sandy went by this week, though. Oh well.  There are plenty of others.

This is one of the more interesting items here.  This old crane is sitting there, one tread sitting on these huge timbers, and the other barely touching the surface of another sunken barge.  It almost looks like someone left for a lunch break, and never came back.   Who would leave a piece of equipment like that parked in the edge of the salt water?  There's got to be a good story here.  I tried an internet search on Platico Point, but really all I could find were some vague references to the abandoned wharf here.   Another small mystery for the  list.

Of course we had to walk around and examine the thing from several angles.   I am totally speculating here, but I wonder if perhaps at one time there weren't more timbers under those treads, and the sea has taken the rest of them away.   Only the weight of the crane is pinning these.

The other barge is also completly collapsed, and the inside forms a nice protected little kiddie pool.  Should one consider a smooth sand bottom over tons of rusty iron a suitable pool.    I bet you could cut your toe in there if you worked at it long enough.

And the rust.  Oh my.  I believe that this crane is long past its expiration date, by any criteria.   I suspect it will be here, turning back into iron oxide, long past the day all of us have returned to our own elements..

I have gained some experience in rust while living here, and I'm pretty sure this is now past the point where a can of WD-40 and a roll of duct tape are going to make much of a difference.   I do have to wonder if whomever is responsible for it thought to drain the oil out before the ocean gets to it.

Once upon a time, someone tied that line from this cleat to a ring on a  concrete bollard up on the shore.  I cannot help but wonder what happened here.  Someone had some big plans.  Someone invested a lot of money, and time, and effort.   I think one has to live here to appreciate how much really went into this in a location this remote. And now it all sits in the tropical breezes, overlooking the reef and the Atlantic ocean. Journey's over for this boat.

Well, by this point we had pretty much realized that living on Middle Caicos full time is full of challenges even above and beyond those of living on Providenciales.   We know people who are doing it, and we've long loved the idea of it.   The mosquitoes really don't bother us that much. We know how to deal with that. We'd build a home up on a ridge back away from the water's edge and the  low rainwater pools where bugs breed in storm season. Up in the cooling breeze and a fifteen minute walk from the beach.  Or we'd do what a lot of people do, and be somewhere else  in the fall.

Is this too remote for us?  We're still discussing it, with a bunch of new factors to consider.   This is hours from the nearest serious medical facility. It would take us an hour to go buy a loaf of bread.  There's not really any good place close by to keep Twisted Sheets.  As I age  I've noticed that  what  I once would have considered inconvenient appears increasingly unacceptable.  I'm in that transition from middle-age to geezer and have to start picking my projects a little more carefully.  Got too many irons in the fire already.   From what I am seeing on Middle, a lot of people have underestimated what it takes to live here in the style they had in mind when they started.  Maybe this island doesn't want to be covered in people full time.  The evidence so far sort of points in that direction.   Especially if one is feeling ancient and looking for excuses.

I like to believe that if I were even 20 years younger I'd be on this place like a duck on a june-bug, though.

We like knowing that there are still places this beautiful where someone can get away and really experience peace and quiet without having to  get lost in a wilderness.   This is 90 minutes of flying from Miami.  There aren't many people here, but those we've met are some of the nicest and most helpful people in the islands.  There is world class bone-fishing all around this part of the country.   And it's quiet. We heard no traffic, no airplanes, no jet ski's this weekend.  If I wanted to get away, and walk a beautiful, remote beach by myself all day without seeing another soul... I know where to go.   This would be a great place to rent a cottage and write a novel, for example.  Or learn to play the trombone and drums, if one were wired that way.  My point is meant to be that you wouldn't bother anyone, and no one would bother you.

While La Gringa and I are still undecided on whether or not we want to move to Middle Caicos, we  are also in agreement that we want to start coming over here for weekends more often.   This kind of island is good for the soul.

Oh, before I forget.   Several people have expressed some concern because Dooley the Delinquent has not been seen in the previous two posts.   He is with us, and we saw THIS photo posted on his Facebook page....

I waved this under his nose but he absolutely refused to discuss it with me.   There will be more photos of him in the next couple of posts.  After we decided  to take our ideas about moving to Middle Caicos under advisement for a while we just relaxed and played tourist for the rest of the weekend.   Got some good photos and videos.  Stay tuned, it gets prettier and Dooley's out on parole.