Bonjour, par lay voo english?

Guadeloupe is part of France. This means that they speak French here and that we on Kaleidoscope were entirely out of our element. Arriving in the city of Deshaies was an adventure. I tried to piece together a vocabulary of usable French words based on French children's songs I remember such as "Le Petitte Poisson" and expressions I knew such as "Bon Voyage" and "R.S.V.P." Most conversations began with "Bon jour!", went quickly to "do... you... speak... English?" and then straight to "merci, bye" or "merci, adios". The almighty dollar, which typically speaks louder than words in foreign countries was useless, as they use the Euro here and appear to have no banks. Also, our shoes washed overboard on the trip down, so we had no transportation.

The next morning was April 1st and we were excited to go into town to post the April Fools Day post which we had put a lot of thought and effort into. Apparently the entire town shuts down on SUndays, so there was no internet anywhere. There was no way we could post this entry on April 2nd. We were so intent on posting that we picked up anchor and sailed all day to the capital city in southern Guadeloupe. From there we had internet on the boat. We posted and had a good time watching the comments come in. Thanks guys!

A couple days later we moved on to Les Saintes. A pretty sweet group of islands south of Guadeloupe. Ashore, we found a European atmosphere in Caribbean climate. We rented scooters for a day and toured the island. We drove pretty much every road, spending a lot of time hitting the beaches and speeding through the town. I liked Les Saintes, but we have a schedule to keep, so after just a day, we headed south to Dominica, just in time to pick up Anika from the airport.

Last night we received word from Josh that he will be helping crew from San Juan to Florida for about 40 days. We're excited to have him, partly because of his company and the help he will provide us, but mostly because we've had a lot of idle time on the boat to think up some awesome pranks to pull on a green crewmember.