Erica's #5 - Take a trip outside the US (2/10/2014)

I honestly thought this goal would be a big stretch to accomplish in under three years. I figured we'd get to the end of this whole 1001 days experiment, and have to take some wild last minute road trip to Canada, leaving just enough time in a weekend to cross the border, take a few pictures, and head back home. Then a little thing called Cayamo happened...

The next few blog posts are going to all be Cayamo related - consider yourselves warned!!!  I promise I wasn't sandbagging when I created all of these goals that could somehow all be accomplished in one amazing week - we had no clue we were even going to try to get on Cayamo until just a few days before Christmas 2013.  Cayamo had been sold out for months already, and after losing the raffle at the East Coast version of Raise the Roof - a fundraiser for Brandi Carlile's Looking Out Foundation - we had just about given up our hopes of a winter escape.  We still had a nagging desire to get ourselves on that boat though - we've been dying to go back ever since our inaugural cruise in 2010 - so I called the Sixthman folks, who, surprisingly, said they could book us right away!  Merry Christmas to us!  Cayamo isn't a cheap vacation by any means, but it's well worth the money!

First, I'll explain what Cayamo is for the uninitiated...Cayamo is a floating music festival, or what the Sixthman folks refer to as "A Journey Through Song".  You board a cruise ship for a week, are entertained pretty much non-stop with amazing music, get to stop at a beautiful (and, most importantly, warm!) port for a couple of days, and, if you're lucky, you get to do it all with some of your best friends (regardless of how long they've been in your life), and make a ton of new friends along the way.

So, this year's port-of-call was the island of Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands.  After a couple of days at sea, we were greeted with beautiful weather in the 80's, plenty of sunshine, and a gorgeous view of the island.

While in Tortola for a couple of days, we took a small boat to another island, Jost Van Dyke, the first day to see Humming House play at a little bar called Foxy's, right on a beautiful beach (but that's a story for another blog!).  The second day, we caught a cab to the other side of Tortola, to Brewer's Bay.  It was one heck of a hilly road we took to get there, but the views and the beach were stunning.  More to come on that, since that day checked a couple more to-do's off my list!

Oh, and our excursions were referred to as "Bertscursions", after our friend Bert - the unofficial tour leader for our group of 10.  There were t-shirts and everything!  We even left a Bertscursions button at Foxy's, so we have to remember to check up on it if we come back again!

The British Virgin Islands were an amazing place to magically end up at for our trip outside the US - I wouldn't complain if the next Cayamo we end up on stops there again...