December 30, 2025

First of all, here are the pictures of Mark’s birthday dinner in Polo last night. They finally uploaded.

We spent time in Dominica last year and had a full day tour. So today, we explored the town, the cathedral and the botanical gardens.

The central district of Roseau, the most important port here, is tightly packed with small and large houses and modern concrete structures. It is framed in every direction by natural elements. The botanical gardens, for example, are rare in the Caribbean. No other center in the region has such an extensive botanical garden.

Here are some pictures of the island from our sail in and docking.

Before we headed out, I had a wonderful massage and facial so I was ready to tackle the day.

On the walk to the botanical garden.

The botanical garden is a large open space surrounded by trees and flowering bushes. It doesn’t have sections of plants like we might see in other places, but the agricultural society has closed off areas that look like they will contain some additional plants. I took pictures of some of the trees and plants but don’t know what they are all called!

We headed back down towards the Roman Catholic Cathedral, Our Lady of Fair Haven, and wound around many streets. Some of them are pretty uneven. We reached the area of the church and stopped in to see how to get to it and a nice man took us there. He explained that hurricane Maria, a category 5 storm in 2017, caused major damage to the church buildings, stripping the roofs and severely damaging the buildings.

They are in the process of restoring the buildings with new roof structures, reinforced columns and retrofitted bell tower. Ongoing work to install a new spire and complete interior finishing has been delayed by tropical storms but they are persisting and the church remains open for services. We were happy to see it.

We walked back toward the ship and checked out the craft booths but didn’t need to buy anything.

We do have trivia today and our entertainment tonight is a guest entertainment duo – This One’s For You, a tribute to Elton John. I am sure we will enjoy it.