St. Martin Trip

After our African vacation, we decided to spend the week before Labor Day in St. Martin. Jerry has a cousin with a house there and it happened to be available for us to use. Compared to Africa, it was not as exciting. The most challenging event was arriving to find the power in the studio apartment off and searching for the fuse box. We were so jet lagged from the 15-hour flight from Johannesburg we didn’t feel like doing anything and the mission to get the electricity going was very draining. We had to call Jerry’s cousin by Skype—We didn’t bring my cellphone because it was broken. After a short drive in our rented car and grocery shopping, we basically just fell asleep. I left a bottle of wine in the freezer thinking I would be have a drink that cocktail hour. I forgot about it; the next day the wine was frozen solid and the cork had burst out of the bottle. I left it in the sink to thaw out and had a very cold drink.

It’s a very beautiful island and we just relaxed, went to beaches, and had drinks.It's divided between a French and a Dutch side, a holdover from colonial days. All of the residents in the complex where we stayed were French, it seemed we were the only Americans. The picture is me at Cupcoy beach, a narrow strip of sand with warm water and nude bathers. The dog in the photo belonged to the people who were selling umbrellas and beach chairs. 

The main town on the Dutch side was Philipsburg. We drove there on a blazingly hot day and had cool drinks as we watched the people from the cruise ships slowly wander back to their huge boat. On the French side, there was a picturesque village called Grand Case where the main drag was covered with beautiful restaurants. There we had a dinner of tapas at the Love Bar which overlooked the beach. 

Almost every morning, I would put on my bathing suit and jump into the ocean on the little stretches of beach that lined the complex. Then we'd eat lunch and maybe drive to Philipsburg or Marigot, the closer town with the shopping and marina. By the time we got back it was cocktail hour. Then dinner out and maybe a DVD. The Republican National Convention was going on at this time and Clint Eastwood was at least a funny distraction. (More on politics in a later blog.) It was difficult to return to cloudy, rainy NYC. We were lucky enough to miss the hurricane and enjoyed fantastic weather for almost the entire five days. It felt as if we had been gone a long time and had been around the world.