"Hey guys," my brother called.  "Free tickets to a Blue Angels show!  Out here!"  I'm a pretty literal person when I'm not paying close attention, and I ran outside looking for a dude giving away tickets.  A royal blue figher jet soared overhead, followed by another, and two more.  Forehead slap!

 

The Blue Angels - man, oh, man, being on this Navy base takes me back to my youth.  Occasionally a fighter jet would buzz base housing, and the sonic boom would shatter shower doors.  I grew up with the sound of roaring planes in my ears.  I can remember going to air shows as a kid - we were able to walk from our house, passing the cars lined up and waiting to turn into the crowded parking lot.  I can remember long hot days, riding on my dad's back, my mother putting cloth diapers on my bare shoulders to protect them from sunburn.  The Blue Angels are, of course, the best part.  They fly in tight formation, a basketball-width from one another, going approximately a zillion miles an hour.  They dive and roll, flutter and spin, looking much more like birds than angels.  I've seen it a million times but it's still pretty thrilling.

 

Jack followed them with wide eyes, looking around for them when they disappeared over the horizon.  The noise freaked him out a little bit, but just a little.  We caught a few photos.  Randy jumped up on the roof, and my mother yelled at him.  It was a great little show.  Military bases are not aesthetically pleasing places, but to me they always feel like home.

Virgil spent his first weekend in the “pup hotel,” frolicking with other puppies and getting passed from arm to arm around the puppy-loving staff.  When we called to check on things on Sunday (Patrick would pick him up Monday morning), they asked a few times if we were sure we didn’t want him to have a bath.  This didn’t bode well for Patrick’s morning, but I haven’t had a frustrated phone call yet, so it must have been a manageably muddy little guy that he picked up today.  We were suckered into paying a lot of extra money for him to play with other puppies his age while at the kennel (instead of whimpering sadly from his lonely, cold cage), so there was no way they were hitting us up with a $10 bath fee.

 

Why was Virge passed off to strangers in only his third month of enthusiastic, trusting, chewy puppy life?  We just didn’t think he’d be welcome at the Pittsburgh Westin hotel, which is where we stayed this weekend, attending a(nother) cousin’s wedding.  Oh, I can only imagine what he would have done to that room.  And traveling 23 floors down in the elevator once an hour to take him out to pee would have been maddening.

 

This wedding was a stunner.  The bride looked every (slender toned) inch the marathon runner she is in her strapless ivory gown, and her groom (my cousin) was all smiles.  The ceremony was held in a large, modern, many-windowed Methodist church, with deep brown bridesmaid dresses (same color as mine!) and dark purple flowers.  They recessed out behind a bagpiper just as Patrick and I had – I like to think we gave them the idea, and boy is it a good one.  Unlike us, however, they chose to go with a highly skilled organist for their ceremony music, instead of a wretched, drugged up string trio.

 

The reception was held in the swanky swank Renaissance Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh.  What. A. Room.  We were on the third or fourth floor – maybe only the second but the first floor had vaulted high ceilings so we were pretty high up.  Anyway, two walls of the room were solid windows, looking out over the sun setting behind the baseball park and one of the many city’s bridges.  It was a stunning view to say the least, and while we waited for about 2 hours for the bridal party to arrive, we spent a lot of time gazing out of it.  2 hours, you ask?  Oh yes, the party bus limo thing they hired to take them from ceremony to reception BROKE DOWN on the highway, and it took forever to replace it.  Somebody finally went and fetched a handful of bridesmaids and the bride and groom.  The rest made it after the second course. 

 

The meal, by the way, was four courses and oh so good.  They had printed menus and everything.  First course – mushroom soup.  Second – fancy salad with vanilla vinaigrette dressing, something I’ve never had.  Then we had lemon sorbet with blueberries, to clear the palate.  The main course was filet mignon, salmon, some layered potato thing, and steamed vegetables.  God, I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it.  That filet – I’ve had dreams each night since about that filet.  It was cooked to perfection.  Dessert and coffee followed, and then after that they passed out chocolate bars with the bride and groom’s names on them, and after THAT they put out little cookies and cannolis on a table in the back, with little bags (with the bride and groom’s names on them) so you could fill up and take them home.  Wow.  We were fed well.  Oh, and open bar all night.

 

We danced the rest of the night.  I met my middle sister’s new boyfriend, who was a very handsome and clever guy – and she lit up like a shooting star when he walked in the room.  I’ve rarely seen her so happy, it was a real treat.  It was fun to catch up with the rest of the fam, including my littlest sister who now apparently plays rugby?  Have you seen pictures of this tall, willowy blond?  I’d think volleyball, track, crew, basketball – just about any other sport before I’d think rugby.  Well, she’s having a great time with it at school, among other things – it’s great to hear that she’s enjoying her freshman year so much.  Mine was wasted on me being a miserable sod, so I’m glad none of my sibs have followed in my footsteps.

 

Patrick drove us back yesterday, the whole way, bless him, and when we arrived home we relaxed on the couch with a candle and some beautifully sung medieval motets.  There is no better way to unwind after a long car trip.  Long hours in the car left me a nest of worries about my career, our money, and our immediate future, and my darling husband rubbed away the knots of stress and misery in my back while I lay in flickering candlelight and listened to the soothing, centering classical music.  Then all of my relaxation got ruined when our opened window slammed shut suddenly in the middle of the night – but that’s another story.  That one, and the one about the cat that had a lonely weekend and punished her owners by meowing all night, will have to be told on another day.  Or forgotten immediately, which is what I prefer.  ;) 

Our frequent weekend trips, coupled with lots of work, have kept me from updating lately.  But I've had family members clamoring for details on what's happening lately in our lives (CLAMORING).  I must keep my public satisfied, or . . . or they'll be unsatisfied.  Last weekend - - - -

In June of 2006 a pair of close friends got married at the Outer Banks – the bride’s family owns a house there, and she got the use of it for the wedding (and also this past weekend, it’s where we stayed).   Their beautiful classy wedding was an absolute blast and also a disaster.  Unfortunately, despite the fact that they’d secured several permits, made preliminary calls to the police department, and had assurances from the city that their backyard reception with Motown band would be fine, it was shut down by a pair of grumps down the road who called in a noise violation at 8pm on a Saturday night.  The police who shut it down could not be prevailed upon to even check out the permits.  Without even so much as a “Sorry WE’RE RUINING YOUR ONE AND ONLY WEDDING THAT ALSO WAS CLEARLY NOT A CHEAP AFFAIR,” they kicked out all 150 of us before 9pm, which was almost 3 hours earlier than planned.  The skiff her dad had arranged as a surprise to whisk them away to their honeymoon was not there yet – the skiff-captain and the caterers and the band still had to be paid for their whole time – the guys had a mad dash to run and decorate her car quickly so it would be ready to take them away 3 hours early (did I mention?? 3 hours??)  Thank God for her wedding planner, who called a local tavern and asked them to host the continuing reception.  The bride and groom, typical of their good-natured cheer, were mad and spluttering for about point-oh-two seconds, and then got over it and ended the night by pole dancing on the bar and sharing tequila shots.  That ridiculous experience, coupled with the CLEARLY UNFAIR speeding ticket I got on my way down to the wedding, had soured me on the Outer Banks.

 

This weekend trip, although great, didn’t save the OBX reputation.  First the trip, then the snark: D is Patrick’s childhood friend, C is D’s college sweetheart and new bride.  We love spending time with them – C is smart, generous, funny, and always happy.  D – well, since he’s married to C and we love her we have to put up with him, even if he is a bit Loser with a capital L.  ;)  The house was a great wooden creaking wonder, we felt like we were on a sailing ship the whole weekend.  Many jokes were made about pirates, arrrrr, which are my favorite kind of jokes as you all know.  The weekend was a bit early in the season and therefore a touch cold, but we still had enough sun to warrant sitting in the sand one morning, enjoying the sun and a couple of Coronas.  The rest of the weekend we spent napping, taking walks, playing games, talking, cooking, drinking, talking some more.  D & C made a memorable meal one night of crab cakes, grilled scallops, oven baked corn on the cob, and sautéed broccoli, polishing it off with some fabulous wine (called ‘Shug’).  It was divine.

 

So, I love the house, I love the people, I loved the trip.  I have no love, however, for the OBX.  The church where D & C got married is a stunning historic church.  It’s an anomaly, though, in a nondescript lineup of nondescript buildings.  C’s family house is really nice, and a few steps from the beach.  It’s a nice beach, but a block behind the beach is the same old strip malls you see anywhere.  There’s little charm, little besides the ocean to delineate this place from Anytown, America.  And when we left the house, with a week’s worth of recycling clinking in garbage bags in the backseat, we discovered that it is nearly impossible to recycle on the Outer Banks.  An ecological “treasure,” a tourist “paradise” to be protected for generations to come, and no one knew where the recycling station was.  It was rumored to be by the fire station, but after carefully inspecting every inch of ground around said station, we found nothing.  We asked at a couple of gas stations – “Er, I don’t recycle, so I don’t care,” were answers to my query for directions. 

 

We went back to the fire station and asked a fireman, who gave us very complicated directions to an out of the way place, and then warned it probably wouldn’t be open on a Sunday.  We turned off the main road, took a fork in the road down a gravel path, drove through a pitted unpaved lot with weeds sprouting up, and came to a rusty chain.  It was a “recycling station” – aka rusting dumpsters clustered by a rusting tin-roofed hut – but only open a handful of hours a day, and not at all on Sundays.

 

We asked elsewhere.  We started our drive home, the car beginning to smell like a bar (we don’t have a divided trunk, so the stuff was in the car with us).  Smoke started coming out of my husband’s ears as I fiddled with the borrowed (and useless) GPS, trying to locate somewhere to dump these bags.  Several false leads later, we found a small town (Edenton) with a visitor’s center, where two sweet ladies told us where the local station was.  Again, it was difficult to find (“Turn left here, then right at the old IGA, and then just past the rickety house with a gorilla on the porch, you’ll see it on your left.”  “Gorilla on the porch?”  “Yes sir, the man has a porch and he keeps a gorilla on it, you can’t miss it.”  It was a stuffed gorilla, by the way.)  No signage at all to help us along.  However, it was open, praise the recycling gods.  A toothless and friendly old man directed us where to dump our steaming smelly cargo, and we walked out of there sticky, stinky, and proud of our dedication to the Earth.

 

And irritated, forever irritated, by the OVERRATED, FULL OF ITSELF, BAD AT RECYCLING Outer Banks.

 

I’d do it all again, though, for that scallops and crab cakes dinner.  Yummmeeeee.

 

Well folks, seeing as how we've been back in the rat race for 5? 6? weeks now, I guess it's time to finish up the story of the 'moon.  Since I've forgotten most of the final day, alas, it should be short.

 

In the morning of our final full day in sunny paradise, we decide to rent another Wrangler.  We love to drive around and just see what there is to see, and by the time we've navigated the sea of car-rental paperwork (this Hertz employee is a leetle more professional than the last) this is all we have time to do - see things.  No stopping allowed.  We've been told that Buck Island off of St. Croix is one of the hundred (or was it thousand?) places to see before you die, so we've signed up for an afternoon sail, and therefore have only what remains of the morning (that would be, uh, two hours by the time we've woken and arranged the car) to see the other St. Croix stuff.  St. Croix is a little down-and-dirtier, a little more populated and a little less affluent than its other American VI cousins.  I like it that way, although I mourn for some of the lovely unoccupied shopfronts in Frederikstad, and wish they had some tenant or other.

 

Anyway, we grab a map and a backpack with sunscreen and water in it, and take to the streets.  Our resort really is in a stunning place, a blue-green cove sheltered between the arms of a "mountain" with only one road out.  We wind up that road and past the uphill "Beast" road, and follow our noses to Frederikstad.  We drive through the small and quiet town, mourning, yes, mourning for the apparently sad economic state its in.  We keep going towards the Plantation Museum, which looks really interesting from the outside but costs too much for us to go in for only a few minutes, and a few minutes is all we have to spare.  Ditto the botanical gardens, and, alas, the beer drinking pigs (sorry, NJaney!!).  We head to the Cruzan Rum factory, and discover that even had we the time to see it, we would not have permission, as it is currently closed to visitors.  Oh well, at least we won't feel bad.  We're starving, having foregone the wretched time-devouring Saman Tree breakfast menu, and keep our eyes peeled for a McDonald's.  We see one in a mall and stop the car, and then fiddle about with The Club for about half an hour.  If one rents a Hertz car on St. Croix, one must put The Club on one's rental car, or if it's stolen one will have to pay for it.  We do our best.  However, this The Club is a little difficult to work with, and it takes some experimenting before we can make it look like a convincing deterrent.  Oh, a five year old could slip it out between the spokes of the steering wheel easily, but it doesn't LOOK that way, and that's what counts.  We decide.

 

The "quick" McDonalds stop ends up taking over half an hour.  We have the great fortune to step in line behind three Kindergarten teachers who are ordering lunch for their 65 screaming students.  I know there are 65, because I count them, because we are in line long enough for me to count them.  Many times.   We try to look patient and breathe deeply as even more seconds tick off our traveling time, and try not to think of how we could have enjoyed a much better meal for the amount of time this fast food is taking.  Instead, we order our burgers and fries and orange drinks to go, with bright fake smiles, and skitter up out of the mall and back to the car, where I devour my burger while driving and spill it all over my lap and simply don't care.

 

We drive from McD's to Christiansted, which I LOVE.  Christiansted is bustling, it's cute, it has a busy boardwalk and nightlife, it feels like a backpackers' paradise.  We park behind the pink stucco King Christian hotel and head to the public restrooms to change into our Buck Island cruise attire - aka flip flops, bathing suits, and gobs of sunscreen.  We have just a few minutes to kill, so we stroll around the old Christiansted fort and drool over the very nice Crucian goldsmithy, where some gorgeous "Crucian Knot" jewelry wraps its fingers around my heart, then rips it out when I read the pricetag.  We step onto our small motor boat and meet our crew - a couple of VERY unhappy islanders (is this a theme?) and a perky curly-headed mainlander who spends his summers in Alaska and his winters on St. Croix and makes me wish I was brave enough to be unconventional and live such a life.  The boat is full of people, including a Finn family with the absolute most beautiful children.  I will never forget those kids' faces.  I know I'm going all maternal here, but looking at myself and my husband one can tell that we will not be having blond spritely children - more like brown little nuts.  These kids had the most piercing Nordic blue eyes, white-blond hair, and little elf faces.  I think I freaked their mother out by staring adoringly.  Anyway, the oldest was probably four, but when we got to Buck Island she strapped on some goggles and some fins and jumped right in that water to swim with her dad, something half the adults on the boat were too scared to do.

 

Buck Island - well, it wouldn't make MY list of 100 or even 1000 places to go before you die - but it was just fine.  Maybe if there were less people there we would have enjoyed it more.  I did get kicked in the face a number of times, and there were several gasping tourists who'd never snorkeled before and waited til they were in the middle of the open water, ages from the boat, before they would admit they were afraid of it.  Patrick and I had to hold hands to keep together in the sea of people.  But it was neat enough, and when I held my breath and dove down deep away from the nexus of legs and fins and screaming children, it was quite peaceful and magical.  The second half of our trip was spent walking on the beach, and we took a short walk with one of our grumpy guides to a less crowded elbow of the island where sting rays and small sharks swam.  We shark spotted for twenty minutes, and I tried to catch a picture of a pelican diving headfirst into the sea because it was SO FUNNY, but the camera ran out of battery.  So instead we picked our barefooted way through a forest path, past an enormous termite hill and dozens of drooping vines, and back onto the main beach, where they were already blowing the conch shell to let us know it was time to re-board the ship for the mainland.  Some girls on some kind of trip ran up to Patrick and asked him where a good place was to get laid, and he blinked at them for a minute before telling them he was on his honeymoon and didn't know.  I smiled, and they squealed at each other and raced back into the water, saying "Sorry!  We're just damn teenagers!"  I laughed at their silliness, envied it a little (um, did I go to St. Croix as a teenager?  No.  That would be a no.)  We hopped back on the boat and headed back to town, where we had dinner on the boardwalk at an outdoor restaurant.  A completely wretched child ruined our meal (In my sleep I still sometimes hear a four year old screechy voice demanding "Mama.  Mama LISTEN TO ME RIGHT NOW."  and Mama saying "Now Christian, please put down that steak knife.  Please don't hold that steak knife to Papa's neck, little sweetheart, Mama wants you to please put that knife down my darling."  I am not exaggerating.  The approximately four year old child in the seat behind me had a SHARP KNIFE, and his "Mama" did not feel it was necessary to wrest it from his little hands and break his every finger.)  So we raced through our food and strolled back to our car, and made our leisurely way back to Carambola for our final night.

 

When we arrived, some sort of slightly scary dance thing was going on.  There were tall people on stilts and in costumes dancing in the restaurant, and literally hundreds of specatators crowded everywhere, going up to the stilt-people and handing them money, like in a strip club or something.  Patrick and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, not in the mood after the knife-wielding toddler debacle, and went to bed, where we could still hear the festivities going til after midnight.  As we had to wake up before five in the morning to catch our ferry, we were not pleased.  To add to our pleasure, a father and son in the room below us decided to have a screaming match beneath our window throughout the late evening.  When our alarm went off before five we were tempted to give them a little noisy noise to get even, but decided not to let our grumps about leaving paradise make us completely evil to other people.  Just each other.

 

Patrick dropped me off at the ferry in the Wrangler, and then dropped it off and walked to me.  We caught the ferry to St. Thomas and then took a taxi to the airport, where we planned to check our bags and spend the rest of the day exploring St. Thomas (we were there at 8am, and our flight didn't leave until 4:45 pm).  Oh no.  Silly us.  St. Thomas airport doesn't let you CHECK your bags,  you  must keep them with you at all times until you pass the security checkpoint, and once passing through those doors of no return you can't, well, return.

 

What.

 

We planned this whole scheme out so we could spend our last day exploring St. Thomas.  We got up BEFORE FIVE AM so we could explore St. Thomas.  But there was no freaking way we could explore St. Thomas with our suitcase.  It was too unwieldy, too heavy, especially laden down with gifts and rum.

 

So instead of exploring St. Thomas, we dragged our baggage across the street to a park and sat there for about six hours.  We could see all the sunbathing people across the bay from us enjoying their Saturdays, we even saw a wedding on the beach, but we were tethered to our wretched bags, stuck in that wretched park, with no food or water or anything to do.  The last day of our fricking vacation and we were stuck.  It took all our willpower not to let it ruin the whole trip.  Anyway, at about 2pm we decided to head back on over to the airport, and it's a good thing we did because the line through customs was about a mile long, and that is not an exaggeration.  It stretched the whole length of the airport.  Once through customs, we went to the overheated, overcrowded terminal, where we waited another hour and a half.  Finally, they called our flight, and we handed in our boarding passes and boarded the plane.

 

A few minutes later, a couple approached us.  Their boarding passes showed the same seat.  We stayed firmly planted, but after checking with the flight attendants we discovered that the seats were theirs.  We were asked to LEAVE the aircraft.  Checking with the lady at the terminal, we discovered that we had called and changed our tickets to leave on Wednesday, not Saturday, and that is what we were currently booked for.

 

What.

 

6 hours in the park, 2 hours in line and an hour and a half in that stuffy terminal, and they were telling us we'd have to do it all again in four days, and meanwhile pay for ourselves to stay four more days!!

 

Long story longer, it turns out that on that particular Saturday Crappy US Air had merged computer systems with Crappy America West, and it ended up double booking and screwing up lots of people's air reservations.  There were no hotels available in the area that night because so many people were in trouble, so it's a good thing that we got on the plane in the end.  Oh, we had to stand at the terminal counter for another hour where my husband quietly had a coronary and I started mentally calculating the cost of staying four more days, and also losing all those vacation days at work.  I think the girl finally believed that we hadn't called the airline between 8am and 4pm to change our reservation for our honeymoon we'd planned six months in advance, when she told us that she could get us as far as Charlotte NC but we would miss our connection, and we explained that Charlotte was our end destination.  She said "Charlotte is your terminus?"  We said, "Yes, yes of course it is, it always was," and she frowned at her computer, typed for about half an hour, called a million people, and let us on.  We took the last two seats on the plane, totally separate from one another, but at least we were on.

 

And thus ended our honeymoon.  Like I said, it was a real shame it had to begin and end in that horrid airport.  But on the bright side, we were met in Charlotte by Patrick's sister Erin and her husband Clif, and they took us out for St. Patrick's day on the town.  It was cold up here in NC, and late, and we were tired, but we found our second wind and enjoyed a couple of Harps on the town.

 

It was a great 'moon.  Lucky us, we got both a mini 'moon and a big 'moon.  Not many people get to enjoy TWO honeymoons!  And now you've gotten to enjoy them, too.  If you've read this far . . . thanks for sticking with it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another 4WD track takes us past some seriously rich people’s houses, and down to the road that our resort is on.  I am still driving – I prefer to drive while Patrick navigates, and I think he likes it that way, too.  The rich people’s homes have names like Hibiscus Hideaway, and have hidden driveways which seems a bit of overkill considering you practically need to fly a helicopter to get here.  I see one stunningly dressed woman walking down the track with her tiny dog.

We pull into Caneel Bay and park the car in the offsite lot – no cars are allowed on the resort, only golf carts.  We hurry to our room to catch our final St. John sunset.  Then, freshly showered and dressed to the nines, we treat ourselves to a fancy dinner at the Equator restaurant.  We are seated by the low exterior wall, so we have open air views once again of the resort and twinkling St. Thomas in the distance.  We had the fabulous roti again (it’s a spicy potato thing wrapped almost like a spring roll, served with banana mango chutney, and I have dreams about it), and sip glasses of sparkling water.  My meal is a grilled kobia (some kind of fish), served with my fave – mashed potatoes – while Patrick has a coconut grilled grouper with Thai noodles.  The waiter takes our picture in the dark, and then we have a quick nightcap at the beach bar.  We head for bed – I don’t think there is a single night on this honeymoon that we stay up past midnight.  It’s so beautiful during the day, it seems silly to waste daylight with sleeping, so we always get to bed at a reasonable hour.  And yes, that makes us old, but too bad.

The next day we get up early.  Check out is at 11am, and we have to pack, and we also want to spend a few hours on the beach before it’s time to leave for St. Croix.  Packing doesn’t take long, and then we gather up a few things and go back to our favorite beach, Hawksnest, which is the only one with sun this early in the morning.  It is deserted, given the early hour, and so peaceful.  The hours pass too quickly, and though our honeymoon isn’t quite over I can’t help feeling like it's the end.

Mid-morning we check out and say a tearful good-bye to stunning room 24.  Then we drag our things to the taxi stand and catch one of the open-air taxis down to the ferry in Cruz Bay that will take us to Charlotte Amalie.  There is no way to go straight from St. John to St. Croix, so we have to go by way of St. Thomas.  At the ferry, and man calls out, over and over again “Charlotte.  Porter porter.  Porter Charlotte.  Charlotte Amalie porter.  Porter Charlotte.”  Patrick takes the bags to the chanting man, and he says “Now you pay tip.”

We squeeze in some shopping for gifts, and a few minutes before departure we are seated inside the ferry, watching a wretched movie.  I sleep on Patrick’s shoulder during the hour plus ride.   Once in St. Thomas, we drag our bags about a half mile up the harbor to the seaplane terminal.  After paying a fine for being overweight by 30 pounds (our bags, not ourselves, thank you), we while away the two hours til departure eating a meal in the Petite Pump Room just next door.  I don’t have a rum drink with this lunch – I need my stomach at its firmest for the journey we are about to take.

The seaplane is tiny, and we are seated at the front, so I could touch the pilots if I want to.  They are both young – it disturbs me a little how young they are – but seem competent.  And competent they are, because we don’t even feel the transition from water to air when we take off, it’s so smooth and quick.  The ride itself is a short 18 minutes, but at the very beginning we drop at least ten feet and everyone screams and giggles nervously – we are riding along with a school group heading to a science fair on St. Croix.  I see headlines scroll across my brain – “SEAPLANE CRASHES, KILLING ALL 22 PASSENGERS.  Students and Honeymooning Couple On Board.”  I look out the window over the water and hold tightly onto the arms of my chair, willing the plane to stay up.

It does, and the landing on the water is just as smooth as the takeoff was, though for a second we look like we’re going to land on LAND and the kid behind me keeps saying “Um.  Um.  Where’s the water?” which is exactly what I’m thinking.  But everything goes according to plan, and really they do this little hop about 15 times a day, so they must be well-practiced.  Our taxi driver to the resort is a talkative and friendly man who’s lived in St. Croix since 1965.  He tells us about the hurricanes that have destroyed the island over the years, and about the Ironman Triathlon that takes place.  Patrick asks if he competes in it, and he snorts and launches into a story about a bum knee that we only half understand.

Carambola beach resort is our destination.  It’s not quite as pulled together as Caneel, but it does have a stunning location.  It has changed management several times in the last few years, and you can tell – there are half-finished construction projects everywhere, and random piles of crap taped off with yellow Construction Area tape.  We don’t get an orientation or even an info packet, which at this place you really sort of need, and we never do get given any beach towels, though everyone else seems to have them.  The whole time we’re there none of the trash bins around the grounds are ever emptied, and they overflow and get covered in flies.  But the beach is stunning, the restaurant is beautifully made (though poorly staffed), and the terraces are tiled in cheery orange with exotic flowers in shiny blue pots dotted everywhere.  It is charming, and full of unrealized potential, and I think anything will look shoddy after Caneel, so I give Carambola the benefit of the doubt.  Our room is HUGE and dark, with mahogany wood ceilings and furnishings, and dark mahogany louvered windows.  Our ceramic tiled shower has no light, and some of our windows have no screens, but we don’t plan on spending a great deal of time in the room, so no matter.  We settle in and stroll the grounds a bit, then go to the managers reception where we have rum punch and appetizers, and are accosted by an eager young chef who insists he just arrived and has big plans for changing the menu at the only resort restaurant, Saman Tree.  We talk to a couple of sour-faced people, and a couple of preternaturally cheerful staff, and then head to the restaurant for dinner. 

Afternoon finds us heading to Scott Beach.  Our beach bag burden gets lighter each trip as we learn what we can do without.  We spend a wonderful lazy afternoon on the beach.  Patrick heads out to snorkel while I read . . . I go to search for the pina colada man with his golf cart full of tropical rum drink pleasure.  He asks about why we’re there, and how long, and what our plans are.  When we tell him that we’ll be heading to St. Croix later in the week, he launches into some story about beer-drinking pigs . . . apparently you buy the pig a beer, and for your two dollars fifty you get to see the enormous thing leap upright onto a fence, grab the beer in his teeth, crack the can open with his tongue, swill it down, and spit the crushed can out.  Animal rights activists, feel free to shudder – the good news is that they found out that drinking so much beer was not good for pigs (hmmmm . . .  you don’t say?) and so now you can only give them NA beer.  After he says “NA” a few times, I figure out he must mean Non Alcoholic.

 

After our conversation, the husband and I snorkel once more.  My feet still hurt from the flippers, so I kick lazily around, and see: a school of bright yellow fish, so tightly packed and synchronized that I think they are a sea lettuce, until I disturb them and they take off, still perfectly aligned.  A “mosaic” fish (my name for it), a checkerboard patterned flat dinner plate thing with a huge cartoon eye, looks and moves like prehistoric cave art.  Coral candelabra stretch toward the sun, the colorless broken-off pieces rolling back and forth with the tide.  I paddle through so many fish, some large and constantly chomping their little mouths like a sea full of Pac Men, some tiny and silvery and darting, like metal shavings.  It is not a particularly colorful tableau, but startling nonetheless, and I could drift out here for hours (the salt content in the water is very high, so it is very easy to stay afloat).  I keep thinking I see jellyfish, but it’s actually bubbles in my mask.  Eventually my loudly complaining feet force me to the shore, and Patrick and I lounge on the beach a bit longer before heading back to our room.

 

Tonight is the free cocktail hour with the managing director, so we rush through quick showers and stroll hand in hand across the grass to the Equator restaurant.  I have champagne, Patrick a rum punch, and both of us eat so many conch fritters and spring rolls that we skip dinner.  Instead we linger, standing on the stone floor of the restaurant, looking out over the low mushroom-like lights of Caneel’s property.  They look like candle luminaries from up here, lining the meandering paths.  We chat with a few fellow guests, pay our respects to the managing director, and then head to the rooftop of the beachfront bar.  A snuggly pair of island drinks later, we decide to head for our room.  A new larger shell greets us on the turned down bed, along with another little quotation card.

 

Our final full day on Caneel dawns warm and overcast.  We have decided to rent a car to explore St. John, and had arranged for one the previous day at the front desk, pick-up scheduled at 9:00 this morning.  And so we dutifully arrive at the rental car desk with snorkel gear and other accoutrements slung over our shoulders.  The car rental man gives us a blank look – even our printed reservation confirmation doesn’t make him blink.  He mutters something along the lines of bloody hotel staff can’t make a phone call why do they keep overbooking god I hate my job, and tells us to come back at 10 am when he thinks he’ll have a car returned.  Patrick and I give each other raised eyebrows, but trudge back to the porch of our lovely room and bide our time for an hour.  When we return at 10, he looks as if he’s never seen us before, and we start to think we may not be renting any cars today.  But at last we get through to him, and he sits us down on a couple of chairs to fill out the paperwork.

 

Thirty minutes later our lean, lanky, and TALKATIVE new friend has filled out one name and one driver’s license number.  He unfortunately doesn’t seem able to talk and write at the same time, and apparently prefers to do the former.  As precious explore-St.-John minutes slip away, our new friend describes his Olympic running career (cut short by a false accusation of doping, he’s still awaiting the payout from his lawsuit), his personality (his friends think he’s mad, and his girlfriend is always yelling at him for being so crazy, but he’s just living life), his parents (his mother is from London, his dad’s here, they don’t get along), and other various personal details.  I sense Patrick’s body stiffening, jaw tensing; he stops speaking altogether and his mouth gets smaller and harder while I try to encourage the talking man to write while he talks – “Do you need any other IDs from us?  Can you read that clearly?  What’s that rate again?”  Finally – perhaps it’s the sight of a half dozen other families waiting at his door for their own dose of his family history – he finishes our paperwork.  Or at least he decides he’s filled out enough (though it’s only half done), and we snatch it from his hands and leap out the door before he can take a breath for more conversation.  We then wait 10 more minutes before our guy realizes that the Haitian assistant he sent to get our car for us didn’t understand English and went somewhere else; at last he goes and fetches it for us.

 

Shortly before noon we’re bundled in and ready to drive – on the lefthand side of the road, though the steering wheel is in the same place as here.  And so begins our St. John exploration adventure.  We decide to drive along the coast and take in the beaches and national park land before stopping for lunch on the other side.  The first beach with a free parking spot is Cinnamon Bay.  We stroll out onto the beach and loll in the sand for a few moments taking it all in.  It’s a wider and deeper stretch of beach than any on Caneel, but much more crowded.  We don’t stay long – it is beautiful, but our car-rental ordeal has pushed back our timetable, and we are starving for lunch.  We drive across the island to a place called Skinny Legs – recommended by fellow blogger NJaney (THANK YOU!) – and what a fabulous place.  It’s an open air restaurant with a corrugated tin roof and various livestock wandering through it, including goats, chickens, and tourist children.  I have a beautifully greasy hot burger with chips, and soak up the laid-back island feel of the place.  After sweat has formed a little puddle at our feet and we’ve licked our plates, we leave Skinny Legs and head to a national park trail that Patrick has read about.  It is a long-ish but gentle hike out onto a point of land that affords spectacular views.  We pass a large number of people, and also several random piles of clothes (?) on our way up.  At the summit we munch on some fruit salad leftover from our gargantuan Honeymoon Beach lunch, and sit on a rock gazing around us at the sea. 

 

At the foot of the trail is a small rocky beach with some decent snorkeling, and upon our return we paddle around in the water cooling off for an hour.  Once we’re dried off and back at the car, I sit in the drivers seat while Patrick my map-loving husband navigates us to the “scenic trail.”  Scenic my foot – it is a nearly impassable 4WD track full of boulders, enormous holes, and hanging foliage.  I grit my teeth every time a branch screeches along the side of the RENTED car, hoping we won’t be paying a fine for damage.  We bump along slowly, Patrick yee-hawing and me slightly less enthusiastic, and pass a sign saying “Tourist Information Center.  Free Information – You’re Lost!”  Oh good.  Patrick tells me to ignore it and press on, and I look skeptically from him back to the incredibly steep “road,” and back to him.  He says if I’m nervous, we can turn back, because he knows that will make me want to push forward all the more.  We bump along on the track for an eternity, and my certainty that we are going to get stuck and die out here grows.  But we don’t die, instead we crest the hill and turn back onto the paved Centerline Road, and look triumphantly at one another.

 

Our next stop is Trunk Bay – easily the most beautiful stretch of beach I have ever seen in my life, also recommended by our personal tour guide, NJaney.  The beach feels wilder, more adventurous, and also more pristine than any other we’ve seen thus far – by the time we get there all the other people have gone and we are, for the most part, alone.  It has rougher surf and an underwater snorkel trail with plaques to read and follow.  It is reaching the end of the day by the time we get there, and the sun is going down, so we only have time to go through the snorkel trail and then play in the waves for a few moments before we must towel off and turn back for the car.

We wake at 6:30 am on the third day of our honeymoon for a lingering breakfast of coffee and pastries on the beach.  The SCUBA intro class is at 10:00 this morning, so we mosey over to the dive shop to check out our snorkel gear.  Since it is, ahem, the CRACK of dawn and we have a few hours to wait, we strap on flippers and mask and dip our toes into the warm morning water of Caneel Bay.   We enjoy a lazy morning snorkel (and, may I interject, what a ridiculous word that is: snorkel).  A large lumbering turtle snaps his sharp beak on a sprig of seaweed . . . a small sting ray wafts by . . . a school of pearl white fish hang suspended, one of them a transluscent, transcendant purple . . .  We float over purple sea cabbage, beige brain coral, large boulders tossed willy nilly in the sand, an ominous looking man-made stone well, completely submerged.  It's overcast this morning, but the sea floor is clear and busy and unaware that above the water is grayer than yesterday, the air cooler.

 

At the appointed time we wrap up in enormous sand-colored towels and take our seats on the roof of the dive shop, where a brown-skinned Ichabod Crane of a man goes through a flip chart with us on "Discovering SCUBA."  It lasts ten minutes, and I'm distracted the whole time by a glob of fruity goop that a bird has dropped on the instructor's knee, and by a half dozen tiny lizards doing push-ups on the smooth-barked tree directly behind him.  We head to the beachside to get strapped into the various gear - weight belt, vest thing with oxygen tank attached, mask.  As we wait our turn a large iguana casually stalks through the beachside bar, trailing a pack of flashing cameras with tourists attached to them.  Freshly weighted down, a handful of us toddle to the water with the instructor and wade chest deep, then plug in our regulators and sink down.  Panic is a bird in my chest squawking at me to get up, get up, breathe air, while the bubbles that pour out of my mouth limit my vision and further freak me out.  I calm the shrieking bird and look at my SCUBA certified husband next to me, and the two young girls also in our group.  I grit my teeth, as best one can with a regulator in, and hold my ground, determined not to embarrass myself.  A few forced deep breaths later I feel ok, and we run through some exercises together.  Find the regulator.  Clear the regulator.  Clear the mask.  We do a lazy swim around the block, so to speak, and that's our introductory lesson.  Immediately afterwards, we're so busy debating over whether or not to do the afternoon dive with the instructor, I inadvertantly lock us out of the room.

 

Late morning we sit on the back porch, writing, reading, burning our complimentary Caneel-Bay mango candle on our porch table.  We have just a half hour before we can pick up our pre-ordered picnic lunch from the front desk, which we intend to enjoy at Honeymoon Beach, one cove we haven't yet seen.  When we do get our lunches we are pleasantly surprised at the size of our meals: sandwiches, fruit salad, whole fruit as well, apple juices, chips, and a ziplock bag chock full of cookies is our lunch, eaten under a low shade tree on the sand of Honeymoon.  The beach is a short hike by road away - it's a public beach, and as such there are no beach chairs or pina-colada toting waiters in sight, and there are lots more boats anchored just off shore.  After our hearty and fresh noon meal, it begins to rain, so we drag our towels and books under the shade of a shack back behind the treeline, and then slip into the water for a snorkel.  Patrick rescues the beach from decline by fishing a beer can up from the sea floor, and after depositing it in the trash, we dive happily back into the deeps, our good deed done.  Underwater, while the sea doesn't exactly teem (due to heavier boat traffic?) there is plenty enough going on for us to explore while waiting out the rainstorm.  By early afternoon the tops of my feet and toes have been rubbed raw by my flippers, and the mask depressions in my face skin are starting to feel indelible (also our fingers are pruny), so we decide to pack it in and head to a quieter beach with less trash and more pina coladas.  We go to collect our things from the shelter where we'd deposited them, safe from the rain, and suddenly hear it start up again, heavy-sounding drops on the dried leaf litter.  Then we realize we aren't getting wet at all and look a little closer at said leaf litter.  It isn't raindrops but dozens of moving crabs making the rustling sound.  Acres of hoary, rough-looking crabs are scrabbling all around us through the forest floor.  They have thick studded sunburn-red claws and ugly black torn-up shells, and they are pretty darn big fellows, too.  I try to get a picture of one, but he keeps hiding from me.  The leaves crawling with little critters is mildly skeeving us out, so we shoulder our packs to go.  At the sound of something unseen but probably much bigger crashing through the undergrowth a few feet from us, we exchange mildly alarmed looks and then hot-foot it back to the road, and to the room.

 

 

Where was I?  Oh yes, that's right.  With my wind-whipped hair a mass of tangles, I step from the ferry to a sea of white-linen-wearing young men who are reaching steadying hands, offering me cool towels from trays of flowers, hefting mine and my husband's bags and directing us to our orientation director.  She's a young girl with a crisp uniform and neon green headband, and she shepherds a handful of us guests through the open air resort (not a single public space is enclosed except the small internet cafe).  She points out various restaurants, paths to the 7 beaches, the tennis areas and croquet lawn (woefully crispy on this particular day, it's been a dry year thus far).  We walk along the paths beside the low slung one-story buildings, painted a discreet greeny brown and further hidden by palms, hibiscus, and tropical almond trees.  She takes each separate family through its own room, and when it's finally our turn she hauls open the heavy door and ushers us into a hotel room with a large King bed, high ceilings, tile floors with seagrass mats - and a back door that opens onto the beach of Caneel Bay.  I am gazing at my genius husband with starry eyes, unbelieving that he found us this room for such a good price - and he is looking somewhat green.  "We're in the wrong room," he says.  "No," I say firmly, telepathically signalling him frantically to shut his pie hole - "Look, here's a bottle of champagne chilling, with a card that has our names on it.  It must be ours."  "But," says my bewildered and soon-to-be murdered spouse, "but I paid for a tennis/garden view room.  We weren't booked into a seaside room."  "I can change it," says the girl, looking warily at us.  "Please don't be mad, sometimes they make mistakes on people's rooms, but it's all quickly mended."  Clearly everyone in this room but me is mad.

 

Once I have assured Patrick that I confirmed both the room number and the room rate, both written on the same piece of paper no less, and he has read and confirmed that it is in fact our (now shared) name on the champagne card, he starts to relax.  We assure our guide that the room will do very nicely, thank you very much, and bustle her our the door before she realizes their mistake.*  Once she's gone I wander into the bathroom to explore, and nearly faint at the sight of double sinks, stacks of white towels the size of twin sheets, and coconut shampoo and mango soap in the tile shower.  I flip open the shampoo cap and deeply breathe in the scent of . . . tropical vacation.

 

I'm still in mainland mode, so I instantly start unpacking and setting the room to rights.  I work at a frantic pace, so eager to get to relaxing that I don't notice the irony tapping me on the shoulder and handing me a pina colada.  Or Valium.  After a while though, we start to settle down, and start drinking champagne.  Soon our heartbeats slow down, blood pressure lowers, and looming heart attacks recede, looking venemously at our twin heroes, the champagne and the beach.  A few glasses later we stumble around, attempting to dress for dinner, and then walk hand in hand to the stunning Equator restaurant, which is basically a big twinkly open-air circle on the top of what passes for a hill on this island.  It's the semi-fancy restaurant on Caneel, built atop the ruins of an old sugar mill, and the designers wisely left most of the old ruins intact and crawling with tropical foliage.  At the sight of our young selves at this decidedly old-rich-people resort, the maitre'd asks if we are honeymooners, and if so would we like a romantic dinner for two alone, in a separate roofless room of the sugar mill, with the stars as our ceiling?  Is this really a question?

 

So minutes later we are installed at a small table-for-two on the grass, within the crumbling stone walls of the former sugar mill, torches our only light, brilliant pink hibiscus our centerpiece.  Although some of the poetry is ruined when we and our cheerful server have to huddle up to one of the torches and hold menus at akward angles to read, all in all it is a damn romantic evening.  The server calls me "Misses" in musical island tones, and traipses up and down the hill faithfully carrying our various dishes.  We dine on roti, food of the gods (gods also like conch fritters, as do I); medium rare steak and thick slabs of halibut; sparkling water and glasses of wine; and finally, complimentary desserts of rice pudding and rum cake, once again because we're honeymooners.

 

We are nearly ill from eating so much, but manage a short stroll along the dimly lit grounds, marvelling at how the low light and the sprawling layout of the resort give us the illusion that we're the only ones there.  We see a stray cat lurking among the stone ruins, and walk on home, falling asleep in a pile on our porch chair, listening to the rhythm of the waves.

 

*We've since decided, after overhearing nearly a dozen couples mentioning that they'd honeymooned at Caneel years ago, that the resort upgraded us on purpose knowing that honeymooners are a big repeat business.  And now if/when we ever return, we'll never be able to stay in any other room.  That's the theory anyway.

There was sun, sand, surf, and copious amounts of seafood.  Snorkeling, so much snorkeling that my teeth hurt from the snorkel and the tops of my feet were rubbed raw from the flippers.  Pina coladas, oh yes, delivered right to our hammock on the beach.  Excellent meals, excellent wine, desserts galore.  Moonlit walks, stunning views, boat rides, 4WD track excursions, and lots of sunblock (therefore no burns.  Well maybe one teeny one on my lower legs.  But that’s it). 

 

In fact, the only problem with our honeymoon was that it began and ended in the St. Thomas airport.  Aka hell on earth.

 

Well maybe not hell.  But definitely not a fun place.  When we approached the St. Thomas airspace on Day 1 of the ‘moon, apparently some Cessna or similar had landed in distress on the runway, so all planes were ordered to circle around and around for a while til it all got cleared up.  Our plane was finally cleared to land, which we did (and boy if it doesn’t look like you’re going to land in the sea at this airport!  It’s a nasty trick to play on a nervous stomach!)  Then we had to park in line with the rest of the backed up planes, waiting our turn at the gate.  The PA system crackled on, and a very apologetic pilot explained that we were on an older plane that didn’t have air conditioning, so we would be sweating it out til we could get a gate.  Yum.

 

Sweat we did, though mercifully not for too long, and then we all filed off the plane and across the tarmac.  We traipse on through to baggage claim, and then the chaos hits.  All the flights that had been hanging out in the air waiting for a clear runway – well, they’d all landed.  My best estimate is that about, I don’t know, a kazillion people crowded into the open air baggage claim area, elbowing each other, screaming at their kids, and parkeing themselves obstinately with shins touching the baggage belt, refusing to give ground even when you’re trying to grab your own luggage and they’re in the way.  I really, really hated humanity there for a few moments.  After a long anxious wait we wrestled our found bags over to the Caneel Bay porter, and we didn’t see them again until we got to our room, which made the steep fee for baggage handling totally, absolutely worth it.  We snarfed down a couple of complimentary cookies, signed a few check-in papers confirming our rate etc., and then trailed out to the chaotic taxi rank and climbed into a van displaying a whole bunch of wonderfully cheeky bumper stickers.  Apparently our driver was a fan of the word @$$hole.

 

The driver hurled us down the street, tapping his horn without ceasing, and dumped us onto the St. Thomas pier where the "Lady Caneel" ferry was waiting to take us to our new home for the next 4 days.  Patrick and I were nervous and highly strung from the airport fiasco, and both feeling a little snippy.  A half hour ferry ride later, when we stepped onto Caneel’s private dock and were greeted by a white-uniformed man handing us a cool hand towel from a flower be-decked tray; when we cast our eyes around the small and quiet sugar-sand beach and Caribbean blue water; when we met our guide who gave us a tour of the grounds, and even later an orientation to our room; when we breathed the sea air and began to really contemplate what a week in the VIs would feel like . . . well then, we finally started to relax.