It's been busy (edited for formatting)

 Hello, everyone. I had intended to post earlier, but got distracted and forgot. We did make a small family trip, to a wedding on St. Thomas.

From the plane en route

The day before the wedding gatherings commenced, we visited the famous mountain top viewing spot. The water there is so amazingly blue! And everything was so, so green. It rained once or twice in each of the days we were there.

We had gone across to Mexico to find clothes for the wedding before leaving, as the bride had chosen a patio wedding in the afternoon. This little blue dress is cotton, very comfortable, and with a cascade of necklaces worked out great. (The long one is jades, some from my grandmother, and aventurine. The short one, a gift from a relative, is cultured pearls. The middle one, like the long one, is from my stringing, but it's just a pretty color combination I had seen in a magazine.) 

I learned that all of the beaches there are artificial, which explains why the sand is the exact same stuff as we see at South Padre Island. Ours comes from the Mississippi River outflow, I don't know where the landscapers at St. Thomas got theirs. The natural shore there looks a bit more like this:

Pretty! And just chock-full of lovely oxygen for the fish. Not really a place to wade, though. Looks really turbulent.

Also for the first time in my life, I saw sargasso weed. DSIL1 tells me that the sargassum patches are popular with bait fish, and if he sees them while boating on the open water, he will dive in and hunt for the predator fish that come to eat the bait fish hiding in the weeds.