We made it… Well not quite yet. After watering the flowers and making sure we didn’t forget anything at home (which we both failed at) we made our way to the Philly airport. Our flight was early enough that we decided a night at the hotel was warranted as opposed to waking up and driving. We woke up in time to get in to the centurion lounge without needing to fight for seats, which was probably a first for the Philly airport. One “free” breakfast and mimosa later we headed to the gate for our flight to St. Thomas. The flight was uneventful except for some turbulence. After we got through it the pilot said he liked to live on the edge so he turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. Adela wasn’t too pleased to hear that on the plane.
Our plane got in a little early but they weren’t prepared for early flights at the airport so our bags still took around thirty minutes to come out. We got in a taxi van with twelve of our closest friends to the ferry terminal in Red Hook. Our luggage on was on the bottom and I swear that’s why we missed the 1 pm ferry. We were then FORCED to get a painkiller, a hot dog, and a beer and enjoy being on vacation. It was really rough waiting. Once we got to St. John mom and pops picked us up and took us to the Westin where we made the executive decision to relax the afternoon away at the beach. Relaxation ended with pops cooking up a wonderful steak and veggie dinner. After dinner we decided we needed some ice cream. The closest ice cream was at the resort store so we began our journey during a break in the rain. As these things usually go, it began to absolutely downpour on the way over. One of us decided that going on a solo mission outside of the umbrella was a great idea. That individual just had to enjoy her ice cream while a little wetter than the rest of us.
Sunday started with a defined plan of leaving by 8:00 am… and I think my parents used their witchcraft timing on us because we didn’t actually end up leaving until 8:30 and it worked out perfectly. Our first stop was the ranger station for the Virgin Island National Park. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you work there) it was closed on Sundays. Luckily they knew what was important to National Park travelers and had the stamp station outside for such occurrences. I stamped my book and the joint book and then we began the Lind Point trail to Honeymoon beach (annoyingly Strava didn’t recognize either way as a segment so I failed to garner street cred for my hike). We stopped along the way to take some selfies and load up Merlin to check out birds.
Once we got to the beach (adequately early) we stoked out a spot in shade and set up our chairs and hung all our stuff on trees. I’m not entirely sure why we hung it on the trees but I will continue to assume it’s so that we don’t bring a bunch of bugs home in to the hotel room. As expected with such a well planned and executed adventure… it immediately began to rain. Well, maybe not immediately – we had time to comment that we could no longer see Redhook on St. Thomas – before it started to rain on us. After enduring the tumultuous rain drizzle, I decided it was time to check out our new snorkel gear. We both like to live dangerously so had never tried it out in the water before. I put my mask on and… it instantly fogged up. Luckily I had some anti-fog drops to put in to it. They worked like a charm and we headed out in to the great turquoise unknown! Only to realize really quick that both our masks leaked a little bit. A smidge of tweaking later and we had a relatively dry snorkel experience. Just in time to hang out with our new friend a sea turtle! We got to shadow him for a little while as he swam around and ate some stuff and chewed it and came up for air. Excellent timing for everything to go wrong and then suddenly right.
After snorkeling we had a little time to read before looking up and realizing it was actually about to rain (unlike before) and began the quite extended process of leaving the beach. We took the Lower Lind Point trail on the way back – which is a little bit less steep than the way we came in on, but doesn’t have as good a view. It turned out that it rained explicitly on Cruz Bay and decided to just drizzle on us again. Oh well! It was still an awesome morning and we managed to stay relatively dry, except of course when we voluntarily got entirely soaked. Our timing on the way back was impeccable… because we didn’t miss Rum Punch Bingo. We thought you just got one rum punch during rum punch bingo and were very excited about it. Imagine how much more excited we were to learn that we got THREE rum punches during bingo.
Afternoon relaxation complete! We went back up to the room to avoid the incoming dark green/orange/red weather radar storm that was coming in. To follow with our theme of weather experiences for the day it basically rained a little bit and then got pretty nice. We think it’s because the direction of the wind kinda suddenly changed. This worked out well because we were able to once again cook the dinner veggies on the grill. By “we” I mean pops cooked the veggies while Adela and I drank a couple beers and chatted. The night ended with the first game of wingspan of the vacation and actually setting an alarm to wake up on time for the next day.
We managed to successfully wake up early on our second day of vacation. Early of course meaning at least an hour after I usually wake up for work. We split a giant avocado for some avocado toast before loading up in the jeep for the forty five minute trek to Salt Pond Bay. Trek might not do the drive justice… I think Adela would call it the terror drive of death to Salt Pond Bay. The drive is quite scenic, but the topography of St John is really dramatic, which makes for a really windy road with a lot of blind switchbacks.
We got to Salt Pond Bay in time to get the second best shade spot to set up our chairs and towels. The beach is pretty cool – it’s like a 0.2 mile walk down to it and they have a bunch of picnic tables set up in the shade for you to utilize. The beach itself was covered with beach sargasm (I have no clue if I’m spelling that correctly – post edit, it’s sargassum, named after the Sargasso sea where it originated) which is a type of floating seaweed stuff. It looks really gross but isn’t too bad when you actually touch it. Once we got our stuff situated (and had dad relax and guard it) mom, adela and I started out on the Ram’s Head Trail. This was a great hike that took us up to a promontory on a little spit on the south side of the island. The views were pretty epic once we got to the top and the hike itself was pretty nice. I was definitely feeling the effects of like a year of no cardio though!
After we got back to the beach (which had filled up significantly with people) it was time to go snorkeling. I went out first because there was a baby sea turtle right in front of our picnic table and I wanted to grab some pictures of it. The sea turtle ended up attracting different groups all morning to watch it do its thing. The fishes were pretty good at this beach and I could see all the spots where the coral was making a comeback (it had gotten almost all destroyed in 2017 when a Irma and Maria came through basically right over the island). The highlight though was definitely the bigger sea turtle we saw and some Caribbean reef squid! They were so crazy looking. The turtle was doing its maverick impression from Top Gun and kept doing flybys of us when it was coming up for air. We ate our packed PB&Js and then got back in the car to make the return trip. I don’t think the return trip was AS scary as going there, and we stopped at a pulloff to get a couple pictures of Coral Bay.
The rest of Monday was spent relaxing and cooking dinner – which was some fresh mahi mahi we had gotten at the store and some more veggies. Tuesday, also known as Adela’s Birthday! began with a plan of going in to town for some shopping and a stop at the brewery. We spent the pre-shopping morning relaxing at the beach and reading our books in order to prepare for the arduous shopping. We allotted ourselves about an hour to stroll through the stores of Mongoose Junction (a very cool little shopping plaza) before we were all too hungry to continue looking at beach themed t-shirts (some of them were really cool though). We got some excellent food and beers at the brewery – Juicy Booty might be one of my favorite beers now – took some photo booth photos, and then headed back for an afternoon at the resort. Adela and I checked out some stand up paddleboards and took a tour of Great Cruz Bay. Some of the houses we paddled by were absolutely incredible! Looking at them made me just want to stay there. Even though we’re already staying at someplace pretty nice.
After some more beach time we headed back up and got ready for our first of two dinner reservations – this one was at Extra Virgin. It’s got a three-course tasting menu with very stressful options because everything sounded amazing. We started with some cocktails and pops made sure to select us a good wine for the main courses. For the meals I got some ricotta with honey comb (and picked wax out of my teeth for the rest of dinner) as my first course, some sausage and gnocchi as the second, and a filet for the third. I think Adela and pops won with their third courses though, the cioppino was absolutely fantastic. We all agreed dinner was amazing before heading back for some sleep before our big boating day.
