Last Day
Location: West End, Tortola
Hello, Simon here, writing another one of the hardest blogs. Hey Mom, Dad, Ilya! I’ll see you all tomorrow.
Again, we wake up to the early morning smell of pancakes being prepared by Lizzie and Dagny. In the middle of my breakfast, I’m suddenly told to quickly stuff the pancakes into my mouth and head to a meeting.
At the meeting, we discussed the conditions of our race that we would have later today. Flash forward to the race, with Ben at the wheel, Jackson and Lucas on the jib sheets, and everyone else’s help as well… we got 7th out of 8. But we’re surely winners at heart.
Afterward, we had an assortment of just about anything and everything we had left in our galley. We proposed the idea to hold mouthfuls of water and slap each other’s faces with tortillas. Hilarious.
As it was our last day, and there were other sessions after us, we all did our best to clean this boat back to the way we first found it. All that’s different is about five broken doors throughout our boat, but that’s out of our area of expertise.
Once our boat was spotless, we were free to walk around West End for some final grocery shopping, restaurant eating, and souvenir shopping for our parents. Later we came back to the boat to divide up the action quest flag between the 12 of us students, and we all pitched in to donate to all sorts of different charities. Our souls are now pure, sins rinsed, indulgences paid, and we’re all worthy of heaven.
We all gathered around, held hands, and the squeeze of the day was our appreciation of the day and of the past three weeks and what we will miss most about our journey together. Laughter behind tears was shared. It was a beautiful, heartwarming, human moment. Then we went back down to the docks for some BBQ, and now we’re having our final moments with the entire program. As I’m sitting here writing this, I see everyone interacting with each other from all different boats, smiles and laughter being shared under the common understanding that this will be our last moments with each other for the rest of the summer.
I’ve seen everyone grow over the past 20 days, and I can only feel proud and grateful for all the people I’ve gotten to spend this journey with. I probably couldn’t write down all my appreciation by the time I even had to get on the plane ride back home, so I just want to express it to everyone who made this experience possible and absolutely life-changing. Thank you.