Meaning to Life | Exotic Caribbean

Monday, September 6, 2004
The flavor of our current Caribbean season has to be hurricanes. The sea-breeze caressed pleasantly warm weather we experience allows us to enjoy a completely open-air style of life and pretty much for a full 365 days a year. This closeness of living to nature means we have to accept the reverse side of the ‘almost perfect weather coin’ too from time to time and around here the flipside does pop up in the form of the occasional tropical storm or hurricane.
We note that the subject is currently figuring prominently in the world’s media headlines because this year is setting storming new records around the globe. This week news from Florida’s latest pounding (the second in August) was echoed by extreme typhoon activity in Japan too.
Here on our island we feel that we have been ducking and diving over the last two weeks as Charley slid by to the south before thumping into Cuba and then Florida, tropical storm Earl thankfully ran out of steam just to the south of us and then most recently category 4 Frances just skirted by to the north. So big was Frances that we experienced quite strong winds and unusually warm air even down here in Boca Chica on the south coast. However, lucky though we have been so far we cannot ignore that Ivan “El Terrible” at the time of writing appears to have us right in his sites, almost as if the last three storms were tracer shells (powerful ones at that) and now the big cannon has our exact coordinates. We naturally hope that fate will intervene in our favor again, but if you see this blog space go quiet for a while it could be because we have our hands full with other matters.

Meanwhile seven years later:
Well, Ivan really was terrible: the 10th most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. The damage was severe in Grenada, Jamaica, Grand Cayman and western Cuba as well as Alabama but again the Dominican Republic managed to miss the worst of that one. The hurricane season is truly dependable and Irene has already passed by this year, again causing severe damage to other parts namely the east coast of the USA. The drenching we got here in Boca Chica is testament to the sheer magnitude of these storms but other than water infiltration (especially of computers) Irene was not so unkind to us.