urbpan | Last of the Vacation pics (I promise!)

I suspect that you're all pretty much tired of my seemingly endless carousels of vacation slides. Fear not, what follows is the end, thirteen entirely random pictures taken during the vacation. The only consolation I have for you is that these are edited down from about 80.

My in-laws house is on a hill ("Galley Bay heights"). At the very top of the hill is the tree pictured above. The sight of the tree is very comforting to me; it symbolizes the whole trip for some reason. Maybe I just get attached to trees.

Higher still than the tree are the big birds. The little birds stay around the house, but the big birds, like this brown pelican soar from one bay to another.

I take a photo of my reclining feet on every vacation.

It's me and Baby Owen!

For my father in law's birthday, my mother in law ordered Chinese food. Somehow there was a communication error, so instead of food for 8, we got enough food for an invading army. We ate Chinese food for several days. Alexis' sister and her husband are still in Antigua, and they're probably still eating Chinese food.

I found this dead anole in the driveway. The ants are very efficient.

A small beetle of some kind, either a click beetle or a longhorn beetle.

I hope there are enough distinguishing features on this mosquito for one of my entomologist friends to identify it. (I think it's the Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus).

Speaking of identifications, when I asked my mother in law what this attractive weed was, she said it was a poinsettia. Close enough! It goes by the common names "wild poinsettia," "fire on the mountain," as well as
"dwarf poinsettia," "false poinsettia," "hypocrite plant," (because it's poinsettia but it's not) "Mexican poinsettia," "painted spurge," and "summer poinsettia." Its real name is Euphorbia cyathophora, in the same (vast) genus as Poinsettia and Spurge.

Here's another interesting weed. Alexis and I were sitting on a bench at the beach, watching a guy get ready to go kitesurfing. He laid out the kite and carefully attached the four cords to it and to his harness. Suddenly he pulled it into the wind and the cords came zipping at us at throat level. We threw ourselves off the bench and dove for cover. Alexis dove just short of the weeds. I dove into them, putting all my weight on one foot onto a full seed head of the plant you see above. I lost my balance but managed to catch myself with my right hand. I held there motionless while Alexis was kind enough to pull a dozen or so of the deeply embedded spiky burs from my skin. My foot and my right index finger were swollen, and it was painful to walk the next day. There are several related species of American bur-bearing grasses in the genus Cenchrus generally called "sandburs." When I first encountered them two years ago in Barbuda, my father in law called them "sweethearts," which I think is great. When they stick into you, you don't say anything nice however. By comparison, burdock and cocklebur feel like tennis balls.