St John - Days 1-3

We started vacation on Saturday by getting up at the buttcrack of dawn and heading to the airport. Hearing horror stories about TSA groping patdowns and security lines of hours, we decided we should get to the airport arond 6:00-6:15 for our 8:20 flight. We had a cab pick us up at 5:30 and dropped by down the street to pick up Jay and Kim.

Of course, we were through security in about fifteen minutes. Figures.

Jay and Kim flew American and we were on United, so Mike and I headed to the Tuscany at one end of the B gates for breakfast. Why, you ask? Because there were pictures of divine-looking french toast hanging all over advertising the place. Count me in.

Once we were about done with our food, the parents and Grandpa Stratton showed up for breakfast, so we chilled out there until our flight.

The flight as a whole was pretty uneventful, and we got to St Thomas around 3 o'clock. We hit up a cab to the Red Hook ferry and took that to St John. We ended up getting the 4:30 ferry, which was then met by our rental car company and our villa company. The villa lady followed us to the rental car place, where we put my Dad and I on the driver list (me being the backup for sober-driving purposes). After that we headed to the villa, and were greeted with this place:


Pretty nice, if I do say so myself. The place was pretty cool and had four bedrooms and four baths. The downstairs bedrooms had their own baths, which was nice, but you couldn't reach them from inside the house. It wasn't too much of a pain to go outside down to our rooms, though.

Once getting our stuff in, we headed to dinner at the Lime Inn and then Mom/Dad picked up Jay and Kim from the ferry. They'd had a connecting flight, wheras ours was direct, so they were a bit later. It worked out well actually, since the car we had the first night only fit 5, and the parents picked up a larger car the next day that fit 7.

Sunday we pretty much just laid around the pool at the house and then headed into town to watch the Colts game ("game day baby!" says Jay). Monday we decided to take a drive around the island. It rained off and on throughout the day so we basically drove around the whole island, ate a lunch of cheeseburgers at Skinny Legs (the cheeseburger smell made me queasy, so I didn't get much down. But I did have a nice after-lunch snack of Goldfish and Berry Berry Skittles that helped), and settled on hiking to a small beach off the roadway called Salt Pond bay. It was so nice, and overall not very crowded at all. I didn't take my camera to this place since it was a bit of a hike and I didn't want it to get soaked. The boys snorkeled a bit and the girls and Gramps laid on the beach and caught some rays. Perfect start to vacation, esp since our bedtimes mysteriously migrated to around 8-9 PM (which was 6-7PM our time... not sure how we started that!). At least I was getting lots of sleep!!