Day trip to Great Britain! Who would have thought?

We were to meet our boat at the Westin Resort, which we saw yesterday on our trip with Jenn. A taxi driver named Moses gave us a ride. We had to go through a locked gate where a guard questioned Moses. It felt a bit like a prison for rich tourists, few pathways out of the complex.

We were entertained by a couple of pelicans diving in the water and posing on the gate as we waited for our group. Tour personnel collected our passports, and we were off.

The ride out was smooth and pleasant. We went along the border between the U.S. and Britain for quite a way in the water.

When we got to Virgin Gorda, the captain handled immigration while we put our shoes back on for our visit to the Greater Baths National Park. A taxi drove us to the start of the famous trail through an astonishing jumble of gigantic granite boulders and curved slabs that make up this path through the park.

The trail started along a sandy walkway headed toward the beach. Lots of people were walking. A couple of places we got stuck behind a crowd, when someone ahead got stuck or scared and tried to turn back, but this is a narrow, one-way trail.

The crowds gave us a chance to study the boulders and evolve a hypothesis of how they developed into this unusual presentation. Deep seated magma (from the garnets) and fairly quick uplift caused widely spaced joints to form. The joints allowed water to erode the edges causing large scale exfoliation similar to the domes in Yosemite. The thick slabs of exfoliated granite fell away from their well rounded surfaces, landing at random angles. Quite unique! We felt lucky to experience these rocks at this precise stage of development.

The trail was tight in some places, but open to the beach in others. I feel like we would have spent much more time exploring if fewer people were around.

After the excitement of the trail through the Baths, we had a quick lunch at a restaurant at The Top of the Baths. We had put in our orders before we arrived.

The boat ride to Norman Island was smooth and easy again. Other boats were anchored where we were headed for the best view of sea life. This island was the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “Treasure Island.”

We asked the captain to drop us off at U.S. Immigration in Cruz Bay rather than at the Westin Resort. This enabled us to find drinks at a bar before going to dinner at a nice restaurant where Clare tried to eat a 2-pound Caribbean lobster!

• Virgin Islands