Crucianize

Tag: St. Croix

  • 23andme Update and More!

    Like my previous posts, which you can find here, here, and here, I’ll be showing off my new Ancestry Composition (AC). In the last post Phasing my 23andme, you read about how my AC changed when I got a test kit for my father and he finally got his results. This update is, interesting to say the least. My AC I felt was improved but my father’s…well I guess it was improved a bit but the percentages and the categories they ended up in was less than ideal. I know that it is difficult to separate French & German from British & Irish and then you add in the small percentages of Spanish & Portuguese as well as Italian. It makes sense when you think about how often borders have shifted but my father’s AC. I’ll just show you below.

    His F&G and B&I quite literally switched positions and for someone who just got a DNA test, it would seem like his father wasn’t actually his father! It is nice to see most of the Broadly gone and I hope in future updates they can attempt to break down the African regions because there are so many different ethnic groups in Ghana alone. Just by statistics alone, you’d assume that Ghanaian ancestry would be Akan but there’s just no way to tell. Try searching for records you say? That is nearly impossible when you have no idea who the father of your great-grandmother was or not being able to go past a certain point. For instance, my Father’s mother was born in the US Virgin Islands, her mother in St. Croix and her father St. Thomas, her father’s line is a giant mystery. I have been able to track back to my Great Great Grandparents Joseph Alexander Boyles born about 1869 but I have a dead-end there, I don’t know where he was born or who his parents were and I don’t know why the last name went from Boyles to Boynes. Sarah Holm is also a complete blank, she was born about 1880 but I don’t know where or who her parents are. I keep looking in my DNA relatives but those names don’t appear to be shared with anyone else. Makes you wonder. For my other Great Great Grandparents, one side is more researched than the other, George Petersen born in St. Croix (assumed) around ?, I currently have a George Petersen born on August 29, 1881, to Thomas Petersen and mother is unknown. Thomas was born in St. Croix around 1856. Here the line stops, Petersen is a very common surname on the Island and everyone assumes that they are all connected but there’s no proof to this, I don’t even have any DNA relatives with the last name. The more researched side belongs to Maud Hines born in St. Croix on July 28, 1899, to Ann “Annie” Eliza Dorothea Boldt (See the baptism record below)

    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B018842-00011?pId=180825

    Unfortunately, Maud’s father is unknown and the baptism record provides no clues. Ann was born on August 8, 1872, the daughter of Joseph “Joe” Boldt born about 1842, and Christina Chamberlin born about 1846 (Baptism record below)

    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B018798-00047?pId=34581

    I have a lot of DNA relatives for my Boldt line so I was able to verify that I had the right parents. Joe and Christina were married on October 28, 1869, just two months after the birth of their first child Ancilla, who was born on August 7, 1869.

    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B011989-00116?pId=900209832
    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B018795-00023?pId=40889

    So all my Dansk Vestindien lines end here and I have no idea how to break these walls…yet.

    Speaking of Dansk Vestindien, I’m kind of surprised that 23andme still doesn’t have an option for there in the Recent Ancestors in the Americas category. They didn’t have Saint-Barthélemy before but I spoke about it on the forums and they added it. My father and I don’t have that but I have Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago. My father has no regions for the Caribbean at all and I find that weird because you’re suppose to have at least 5 DNA relatives with all 4 grandparents from that area to get the region but he has more than 5 for Saint-Barthélemy and he doesn’t have the region. What gives 23?

    I know of relatives in Trinidad and Tobago from my father’s side but to actually get the region is surprising until I checked it, I have as many relatives on my mother’s side as I do on my father’s, who knew!

    I’m assuming most of the people from Trinidad and Tobago are from my father’s paternal side because there were a few people who left Saint-Barthélemy and moved to Trinidad. I was contacted by one a few years ago and it was a revelation to me, I had always thought that most left St. Barts for either the States or the Virgin Islands, I was wrong, so wrong. I learned about those who left for Australia, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, those who moved back to France. They are quite literally everywhere.

    Here’s my AC update, like I said it was an improvement unlike my father’s.

    Yes, I have Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occiataine regions for France just like my father, imagine when I first took my test I only had 3.3% French.

    I look forward to seeing what the future will show because they almost always offer something interesting to look at.

  • Finding My Roots In The Caribbean

    I was thinking how crazy it is that I began my genealogy journey in 2006, that’s 14 years ago, way older than my oldest child. I was barely a child myself, 19 years old and I had no clue what I was doing. I just jumped on Ancestry and started putting in names my parents gave me. I hit a huge brick wall because there were so many people with the same name and people frequently used only their middle names or nicknames. I did a google search for my great grandparents’ names which lead me to a thread on Ancestry about a family with that name. It looked correct so I put it in my tree. Biggest rookie mistake ever!

    Luckily for me, it was the correct couple and that lead me to a distant cousin who had all kinds of information on my grandfather’s mother’s family. This was the first time I’d learned that her name wasn’t Josephine but Marie Josephine. The tree of this cousin took me all the way to Joseph Simon Turbé my 5x great grandfather. I assumed he was born in St. Barts as well since everyone else seemed to have been also, another rookie mistake. I did another google search which leads me to Anne Marie Danet’s post on her blog 3 – First French in the Antilles, you can see on line 24 there is a Joseph Turbe who married Anne Rose Greaux and he is the ancestor of all Turbe on the Island. This Joseph is my great grandfather. This suggested that he was from Nantes but he wasn’t born there which was a brick wall I had for a long time.

    To break this wall I scoured all over the net, looked at several family trees, and then I found a reference somewhere that said he was born in Couëron, I had never heard of this place before.

    Couëron is a commune in the Loire-Atlantique department in western France. It is part of the historic French Brittany. Couëron is one of the 24 communes of the Nantes Métropole.

    It makes a bit of sense why he would be considered a Nantes native but it is very unhelpful for a novice. So, I now knew where he was from but I had no idea where to find information about his parents. I asked a question on Wikitree in 2018 asking if anyone could help me find his Acte de naissance or Acte de baptême. A very helpful person pointed me in the right direction and I found not only his Acte de baptême but that he had a brother! I haven’t explored much of his brother’s descendants, maybe I should do that sometime soon.

    There’s a really nice blog about my great grandfather that you can read here: Capitaine Simon Joseph Turbé

    Now I work on all the families of Saint-Barthélemy, sometimes I find a link to my family and realize this stranger suddenly became a distant family member. I spoke a bit about it in my post about my Saint-Barthélemy Project last year, I actually have an update on that post that I just never posted about. I now have the ancestry of my 3x great-grandparents Anne Louise Chapelain and Pierre LaPlace thanks to the author of The Saint-Barth Islander. He was very helpful and I was able to make connections on those lines in my brother’s Ancestry DNA tree. The Joseph Chaplin that I thought was my grandmother’s brother was in fact her brother and someone made a typo on his age.

    For now, I’m working on the Governors of the US Virgin Islands/Danish West Indies. It is much more challenging work compared to researching my French ancestry. A lot of them were descendants of slaves and those records are not so easy to go through.

    If you’re also looking to do some research in the Dansk Vestindien I suggest this site Caribbean Genealogy Library or CGL for short, I find myself using the records for St. Thomas a lot when working with my French side because many of them left St. Barts and ended up in the Virgin Islands. I’m particularly fond of the:

    St. Thomas and St. John Government (archive no. 693), Reports of births, St. Thomas and St. John, 1859-1918 (nos. 30.1.1-6) and St. Thomas and St. John Government (archive no. 693), Reports of marriages, St. Thomas and St. John, 1828-1918 (nos. 30.2.1-7), these two have proven very very helpful.

    For census records, during Danish time you can find those on Ancestry which of course requires a subscription to use but you can also find the St. Croix census on the Dansk Demografisk Database by Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archives), all you do is enter a name and it will bring you up all instances of that name appearing in the Census records.

    Show Household will display everyone that lived in the household.

    Show all Fields will show you all the information about the person you were looking for.

    It is a pain because you have to search for everyone one by one but it is free so I can’t really complain. I should note that not everyone can be found this way, the record you are looking for might not have been transcribed or the name is spelled differently than you are looking for.

    For the more recent Census records you can find them on Ancestry or you can look on FamilySearch, FamilySearch is free to use, you just have to sign up for a free account. It is a very useful site because you can also look up their free world tree to see if your relatives are already on there. If they are you will be notified when you search for records about them. You can see it circled in the photo attached.

    There are not that many of us doing Caribbean genealogy on Wikitree so if you are interested in helping I’d suggest joining and helping put our Islands on the map.

  • New 23andme beta update

    So last night 23andMe released their beta update.

    I spoke about it on this post 23andMe: Changing Ancestry Composition.

    If this is your first time hearing about it, 23andMe is a DNA testing company, it’s one of the more well-known ones, you have Ancestry, 23andMe, MyHeritage, and FTDNA, which does big y DNA testing.

    Along with the introduction of Trace Ancestry category. My estimates have gone through quite the change.

    I’ve always found my French & German percentage to be on the small side for having a father who is half French. This estimate is more understandable. I went from 3.3% to 9.7%. My British & Irish also went down, for the longest time it was higher than my F&G and it shouldn’t have been. It’s nice to see that they’ve shifted some of the B& I over to F&G where it belongs. I just hope they’ll be able to do the same with Spanish & Portuguese because I have no known ancestry from those areas, what I do have is Ancestors who lived in border towns so maybe, just maybe they were S&P?

    Here’s my complete update:

  • Identifying my curl patterns

    Welcome back!

    Today I’m going to talk about one of the most common topics of discussion in the Natural hair community, curl patterns.

    To be honest I’ve never given it much thought at all because I have more than one type of pattern of you go by the chart that seems to be everywhere.

    This chart right here:

    According to this chart, the front of my head is a mix of 2c and 3a, the middle is a mix of 3b and 3c, the very back of my head is 4a. Like I said before I have a lot of curl patterns.

    The curl patterns aren’t that important though, it’s the porosity of the hair or so I’ve been told.

    My hair is low porosity and coconut oil is supposed to be really good for this type of hair but I can’t use coconut anything or my hair will become very brittle and break horrendously.

    Having hair that dislikes Coconut with a passion is kind of difficult, to be honest because so many hair products geared towards Afro hair have it in it. There are so many highly favored cult favorites that I just can not use.

    I’ve begun to disregard all the suggestions that have been thrown my way because what works for one person’s hair doesn’t work for everyone, sometimes you just have to find what your hair loves.

    My hair loves Argan, Avocado, Rice water, and Jojoba. I know this because I’ve had favorable results with them.

    When I shaved my head back in 2017 I honestly didn’t know what kind of curl pattern to expect, when I was youngest my mother used the wrong products, and my true pattern was hidden.

    You probably can’t see it well but my hair was like a 2b and almost like a straw broom, to be honest, it’s like when I flat iron my hair and take braids out.

    I’m pretty sure that texture was because my mother used this grease on my hair.

    My hair doesn’t do well with grease at all, it is very heavy and what that does is that it drags my curls down until all you see is limp greasy strands and washing did nothing because as soon as we were done washing my hair with shampoos and conditioners that stripped my hair she would comb it with a fine-tooth comb and it was painful so painful that I’d run away and hide until my hair was pretty similar to a bird’s nest and then the real pain would come when she tried to de-tangle it while it was dry!

    All my life my mother said my hair wasn’t as good as my middle sister’s because I didn’t have curls like her but when she sees my hair now she can’t believe how similar my hair actually is.

    My hair is curly and coily but to maintain this it needs the proper care.

    I’ve developed my own routine and I baby my hair so that I can look at it and feel a sense of pride. My hair is just as good, my hair is my crown.

  • The Useless Sibling

    The Useless Sibling

    Hey guys,

    Today I want to talk about something that has always bothered me.

    Ever since I was very young I’ve always viewed myself as the useless sibling. I have two older sisters who were obviously intelligent, they got good grades they were Salutatorian and Valedictorian of their classes, I also have three younger brothers who are also obviously intelligent, graduating with High honors, internship, also Sal/Val of their class, and then there’s me.

    Quiet, can’t speak in school, trouble with bullies, terrible grades, held back twice, nothing really special. I didn’t graduate with honors and I didn’t go to college, I am the useless child. Every parent must have a dud and I always knew it was me.

    When I was younger you could go to Wendy’s for a free meal with your report card and for whatever reason my father always brought me along to see my siblings get their free meals and he would buy nothing for me. I’d sit there and watch them eat and feel out of place.

    He’d also do this with toys, I got nothing while they got something new to play with. I never really blamed my siblings, I blamed myself for being too dumb to understand the work, too dumb to be able to speak.

    My mother probably didn’t know about this and I know if she did she would have bought me something even if it was something small and tiny. She never let me feel useless until that one year she said to me “if you get good grades, I’ll buy you that doll you wanted”, I worked my ass off and I didn’t get that doll, sold out is what she told me.

    I think that was the same year my youngest brother was born and my grandmother, my mother’s mother passed away. I remember not feeling anything really, I didn’t cry, I didn’t understand why others were crying but when I saw my mother break down I felt it, I cried because my mother was crying. I loved my grandmother and I have very fond memories of her but I just don’t feel emotions like other people.

    That was also the very first year I was held back, I stopped trying, I stopped caring, my first experience with depression but nobody noticed. They said I was being difficult and willful. Nobody saw me.

    I used to have a very best friend that I’d eat with hanging out every chance I got and the very next year we stopped hanging out and I’d sit by myself on the stairs in front of my classroom. I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t eat lunch, my thought was not the best and I didn’t know how to change them.

    It’s not to say some of my classmates didn’t try, they did, they invited me to sit with them under a mango tree, they’d share a little of their lunches with me and talk around me. Never to me because everyone knew I didn’t talk. I barely even smiled or showed any emotions.

    For my entire young life, I felt out of place like I couldn’t understand my peers, they were all speaking a language I just didn’t know. I tried to emulate them, I tried to have crushes like the other girls and copy their mannerisms and what I thought their thought patterns might be but it was like playing a part I had no business trying out for.

    In Jr. High my second year of 7th grade after being held back yet again I encountered a teacher that challenged me. According to one of my older sisters, she was in the woman’s class all of one day but this woman would constantly call me by my sister’s name and it chafed because I had my own name. This woman would also make fun of students who did poorly and I was not going to let her make fun of me, she was going to know my name. Mine, not my sister’s but mine.

    I got into honors that year, I spoke for the first time that year, my grandfather, my father’s father passed away that year. My mother was pregnant with my baby sister that year, 9/11 happened that year and my mother lost my baby sister that year.

    It was a catalyst for me and I let everything push me into doing everything I could to get out of school.

    It didn’t matter. My father still didn’t acknowledge what I had accomplished, I was still the child that couldn’t speak and couldn’t make it in the real world because I was filled with so much anxiety I couldn’t do half the things my siblings could.

    It’s amazing how much your parents can hurt you without knowing they did or maybe he knew exactly where to inflict the worst pain.

    He’s such a confusing person, he says these cruel things but then he took me out for my birthday just me and him and he bought me a birthday gift that I never thought he would. We’d go out to the movies together and we argued yes but it seemed like only the two of us did these things. My father was like me.

    He was filled with anxiety and he didn’t know how to express his emotions.

    As I got older I learned more about him just by observing him and I am so much like him not just in looks but in temperament.

    All those times when he’d sit by himself away from others, I understand it now, he looked so cut off from us because he didn’t know how to interact with us.

    When he’d want to leave or not go to a social function, I fully understand it. I hate social functions and how it drains me.

    His special hobbies, his desire for a schedule, I do all of this as well.

    I felt like I was looking for his approval and never got it but I was the only one he’d call to help him, the only one he showed a little attention in, I think my father understood me just a little better than I understood myself back then.

    That saying he kept saying to me? That I’d never go anywhere and be able to survive in the real world?

    I took it to heart and pushed myself, I left home and traveled internationally, I got married and I might still struggle socially but I function on my own level.

    I might not be as academically fortunate as my siblings but I am not the useless sibling, I made my success in personal battles and I accomplished my own great things.

    Thanks for reading a tiny bit of my story.

  • 23andme: My Changing Ancestry Composition

    I don’t know if I ever mentioned before that I took a DNA test with 23andMe on here but I took one back in June 2018. The main reason I took it was to discover who my father’s family was, my father was adopted when he was young, and while we knew the names of his parents I didn’t know anything else. My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 13 years old and in all that time I had never even met him, my two older sisters stayed over at his house but never me. I’m always told that I look like his side of the family so it was a pretty hard blow to never know him or about his family and wish that I had been given that chance. I have no pictures and very few stories to even remember him by so I took to genealogy to try to learn something.

    My grandfather was born in Gustavia, Saint-Barthélemy, Antilles françaises in 1920. He was the son of Vitalis LaPlace and Marie Josephine Turbé. My grandfather left his home to stay with an aunt in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands where a lot of French people migrated to in the late 1800s. While my father was born in St. Thomas he grew up in St. Croix where I was born and I didn’t visit St. Thomas until I was well into my 20s thanks to one of my older sisters.

    One of my younger brothers did an Ancestry DNA test in I want to say 2017 but Ancestry doesn’t ship to France so I went with 23andMe. Looking at my brother’s results I had an idea of what my Ancestry  Composition could look like and I was excited waiting for my results.

    I got my results back on June 18, 2018:

    The African portion was pretty underwhelming and my French & German was pretty small for someone whose grandfather was a French man.  What I have since learned is that some of the British & Irish, Iberian, Italian, and Broadly categories were hiding a good portion of my French DNA and it was nearly impossible for 23andMe to separate it from the other areas of Europe because of migrations over the ages.

    Sometime around October 23andMe updated their African categories and I had a brand new Ancestry Composition to look at:

    My West African was broken down into Nigerian, Coastal West African, Senegambian &Guinean, Congolese, and Sudanese. My African Hunter-Gatherer category disappeared. My British & Irish went up, Italian went up, Iberian went down, and Scandinavian appeared. Western Asian & North African categories appeared. Everything else remained more or less the same.

    In December 23andMe once again updated their categories:

    The Coastal West African category was broken down into Ghanaian, Liberian, & Sierra Leonean. Iberian was changed to Spanish & Portuguese. Everything else remained the same.

    Yesterday 23andMe invited their V5 customers to try out a Beta Update to their composition:

    My Ancestry Composition went through a lot of changes!

    Central Asian & South Asian was added

    My African categories were all decreased with the exception of Congolese and Sudanese. I gained a new category as well, Southern East African. My European increased Spanish & Portuguese now being my highest category at 6.6% British & Irish decreased from 8.9% to 6.0% my French & Geerman went from 3.3% to 5.6% I completely lost the Italian I had which doesn’t worry me much since I never had any Italian paper trail. My Native American remains unchanged through all of these updates.

    It has been so fascinating watching all of these changes and I can’t wait to see what other changes happen later on.

    On the paper genealogy front, I had a really big breakthrough yesterday as well. I have a brick wall 3x great-grandmother Anne Louise Chapelain who I couldn’t find any information on her parents or siblings but yesterday I decided to go back over my work to see if I missed anything and while going through my 2x great-grandfather’s second marriage I found an uncle named Joseph Chaplain in the witness section. This Joseph Chaplain would have been 35 in 1888 so born around 1853 give or take, I think he might be a half brother because Anne Louise was born around 1835, that’s a good 18 years older and depending on her mother’s age might have been way after her childbearing age. I haven’t found anything on him so far but I have hope.

    Until Next time!

  • My Hiking Experience on St. Croix, US Virgin islands

    Hiking to the Tidal Pools

    All of these pictures have digital artifacts, my camera was pretty old at this time and it made me sad that I didn’t even know why my pictures had those weird squiggly lines in them.

    Yesterday, December 30, 2012, my family and I hiked to the Tidal Pools on the Island of St. Croix, US Virgin Islands.

    Let me start off by saying I had never been to the Tidal pools, didn’t know about them until recently even though I was born here and lived here my whole life. That being said I had no idea what I was getting myself into by saying I want to go on this hike.

    First I got up around 8 am and started to get ready by having a quick shower, I knew I was going to sweat on the hike, without a doubt, only a mountain goat wouldn’t sweat after walking for 2 hours. Yes, this hike was 2 hours to get to the pools and 2 hours to walk back from the pools. So I showered and started filling my bottles of water, no cold water only room temperature, it wouldn’t do to shock my system by drinking ice cold water after walking in the hot hot sun for so long. Water-ready, I’m ready, got a call that said my cousin wasn’t going to be able to come even though he was the one who knew how to get there and was going to drive some of us down there so we didn’t have to hike.
    He’s not coming again, so my mother was like “Oh well, I guess we’ll do something else” naturally I was disappointed, I wanted to see these pools and it was a big letdown after waking up so early and filling up the bottles…I didn’t want to stay home or drive around, that’s boring.


    I guess my aunt was feeling the same and my brother and other cousin had been there before, they knew the way so we decided to hike it still.

    It was a long drive to the road where we would begin the hike, it was located near the Carambola Beach Resort and Spa which is on the West end of the Island and we live more towards the East End of the Island. Yes, the Island is small only 82.88 square miles but when you grow up here it seems very big.
    When we were close to the resort I started to take some pictures because the view is beautiful, I was happy taking pictures out the car window when I caught a man jogging in one of them, I have no idea who he is but he is now a centerpiece of one of my photos.


    We drove up to the road, and started getting out of the cars, there were four cars in total, one car held me, my sister, one niece, and two of my brothers, the other car held my oldest sister, my youngest brother, my mother and my two other nieces. The third car held my aunt, my two cousins, and her two kids, the fourth car held my uncle, my other aunt, and their two kids. There were 19 of us in total and we were ready to hike this thing!

    My brother and my cousin would lead the group since they’ve been there before, my sister had also been on the hike before but she stayed in the middle in case the group got separated for any reason. We began walking, and it seemed we had been walking forever, it was fine, I had my water, my bag holding my camera and sd card wasn’t heavy and I had a good pace….until it started going uphill. That was the worst part of the Hike for me, going uphill. I got winded so bad, I honestly believe my heart was going to give out on me right there on the trail, the others were still going and I could see them but I had to take a rest, I wasn’t alone, my cousin stopped beside me and then everyone else stopped ahead, the stragglers came up to us and stopped too. I had been on a hike before, was much earlier in the year but I had done worse, I didn’t pack any water that time so this time I was prepared. I took sips of water and calmed myself, drinking too much water would have made me sick and probably cause me numerous problems on the hike including having to drain fluid somewhere in the bushes…I wasn’t interested in doing that so skip it I did.

    Taking our break

    The break was over and it was time to move again, it’s been about an hour since we started to walk and some of the group was very tired, I wasn’t feeling too bad after sipping my water, my heart was even back to normal, I did feel a bit fatigued though, we continued walking but on even ground with a few dips here and there, we came upon a beehive of African Killer Bees, everyone had to be very quiet so we can walk past there without agitating the bees. It was very tense because of the little kids, just the slightest sound can bring a bee out of the hive. There we were trying to pass by the hive in single file quietly but rapidly so no one is stuck by there for a long time. We passed there successfully and continued on our journey.

    Next, we had to walk by some tall grasses, it was such a pretty view that I stopped to take pictures, I told them to wait for me but they didn’t stop, I was up in the front so I wasn’t too worried about being left behind.

    View from the tall grass

    I should not have stopped, on the ground were hundreds if not thousands of red ants, and when I stopped they crawled up my legs, I hadn’t noticed but my cousin’s daughter was quick to tell me “You have lots of ants on your legs”, let me tell you the feeling was not pleasant, I started stomping and shaking my legs, brushing them off in hopes of getting these ants off but everywhere we walked there seemed to be more ants, we walked through some very tall grass that reminded me of scenes from the first Jurassic park, it was kind of amusing, the Velociraptors would be the red ants and they were biting!

    On and on we walked with these ants just crawling all over the ground and onto our shoes even while walking rapidly, we finally reached a dirt road where there weren’t as many ants and I immediately started stomping my feet and brushing ants from my sneakers, one ant already bit me and I was not going to allow any of the others the chance to taste my flesh.
    We walked down the dirt road for a good while before coming up to a stony beach, finally, some of the younger kids thought, the beach! But this was not the end of our journey.

    Stony beach before the pools

    Nope, our journey was to take us over jagged rocks and brave rushing water with big waves, our destination was not this beach. I didn’t even know at the time that the pools were on the other side of the jagged rocks so I took some pictures of the view, and it was a spectacular view, the hills in the background, the water, and the rock outlines made for a beautiful display.

    Then is when I learned that the Tidal pools I had walked over such treacherous terrain to view were some ways over on the other side of those rocks that can cut flesh and the waves crashed onto. I was game, terrified of slipping and being taken away to sea but still game.
    I have never climbed so fast in my life before, I felt like a monkey climbing for its life, clinging onto the rocks and looking for hand and footholds so I don’t fall into the rushing sea. I was thinking to myself is it worth it? I hope it’s worth it or I’ll be so upset.


    When I finally reached the other side, the view answered my question.

    My brother standing on the jagged rocks

     It was worth it, I had never seen such a beautiful rock formation before in my life, the water was reflecting off of the rocks and forming a moving sparkling show for the eyes to behold, the water was clear and you could see fishes of blue and black swimming happily along the bottom of the Tidal pool…this…..this was totally worth, tripping over tree roots, nearly suffering heart failure and being bitten by red ants. I will never forget such natural beauty.

    My youngest brother and oldest sister enjoying the Tidal pools