Sunday, April 29, 2007

Stardate 61324.21 - Vacation Day Nine

As Tuesday arrived we were faced with the unpleasant realization that we only had 2 more full days on St. Martin and that at least one of them would be spent closely monitoring Loren for any signs of illness. I got our breakfast to go from the Sunset Cafe and we ate in the room. We took Loren out to the area in front of our room for her to play in the sand, but we didn't take her into the water and we didn't give her any milk in the morning.

After eating lunch in the room and Loren's nap, we decided she seemed well enough for a car ride so we went to two more beaches, these being on the Dutch side of the island. The first was at Baie Aux Cailles. The travel book said to be very careful as some of these beaches were pretty deserted and to take extra care to leave nothing in the car of value. Where we parked, however, actually had a security vehicle with a person in it monitoring the parking area. I wasn't sure if I should feel good about him being there, or bad because it was necessary for him to be there.


The beach was nice, but the construction cranes and half-finished (half-demolished?) buildings detracted from the experience. Also, the private homes had all build huge walls around their property, right to the beach - another eye sore.



We only stayed a few minutes and then got back into the car and drove to Cupecoy Bay, which was supposed to have a more cliff-like approach to the water.


It sure was a different feel from our beach, but I'm not sure if it was due to the cliffs or the fact that the particular stretch of beach we elected to climb down to turned out to be a full nude gay male beach (not that there is anything wrong with that). But I really didn't have any joy in seeing a bunch of completely naked men standing up to look at the intruding, clothed family entering their space to snap some pictures. Needless to say, I focused our shots on the part of the beach that was empty.



We hit an ATM while we were on the Dutch side to get some more US dollars, and then drove back to the hotel. To continue the low-key day, we just ate dinner in the room. Loren seemed fine all day, so we decided that for Wednesday we could proceed as normal. Her vomit episode Monday night seemed to be a one-off event.

NYC

3 comments:

JamesF said...

Is there a topless woman in picture 787? Is that the real reason you took that picture? And here I thought this was a family friendly blog. :-)

Curt Sawyer said...

Yes, but I honestly didn’t realize that until we downloaded the pictures from the camera. In another picture I zoomed in on the construction cranes and it is really obvious.

Half the island is French - a good 20% of the women on the beach were topless.

JamesF said...

Leave it to me to pick out the five pixels representing the naked chick.

Curt: Half the island is French - a good 20% of the women on the beach were topless.

I seem to recall from when I was there that number seems a tad low. I would say 30% of the women were topless when we were there, but I should qualify that with you probably wished 90% of those that were topless weren't.