Our last full day in Tortola wasn’t terribly ambitious; when we woke up we were feeling sort of lazy and so we didn’t make good on our vague notion to drive over to the beachy north shore and snorkel for the day. Good thing we didn’t, because at about mid-afternoon the clouds ganged up and deluged on us. At first it was a pleasant cool sprinkle, and then it was like a cosmic bucket was upended on our end of the island.

After congratulating ourselves for spending the day at home, we went back to reading our books. We’d laid in some supplies so we were good for lunch and dinner if we didn’t feel like going out in the rain.

After a while, though, the rain came in to us.

Yes, one more reason not to recommend Fort Recovery to friends and clients; the rooms are attractive, but the “villas” are overpriced, the beach is small and weedy, the “exercise room” is a joke, the wireless internet access is wonky, the pool is tiny and shady and missing basic safety items like a handrail and depth markers, and the buildings take on water when there’s bad weather. On their website and in their ads, it sounds like a marvelous retreat,with spa services and daily yoga classes on their large boat dock/deck, but we never saw any yoga other than one guy working out on his own. And I never bothered to check out the spa stuff because it appeared likely that the spa stuff was tucked in the back of the “reception area” as an afterthought much like the un-air conditioned “exercise room,” or it was conducted on a battered open-air platform out by the boat dock.

After several days’ stay we concluded that a lot of the guests were friends and family of the owner, who was helpful enough when we had minor complaints about the noisy air conditioner in our villa and willing to change us to another, nearly identical villa. But the vibes were kind of weird.

Anyway, after watching several small streams pour into the living room from above and scrambling to find various garbage pails and pots to catch the drips, we decided it was a good thing we weren’t caught somewhere at the end of a bad road in a deluge.

All in all, we collected about a half-gallon of rainwater in our various receptacles, which would have run down the middle of the living room and perhaps reached electrical cords if we hadn’t decided to have a lazy day in instead of an active day out.