Are you all sick of hearing about my vacation already? Well, this is the last post – I promise 🙂
We left off with arriving at Disco Bingo…what a hoot it was! We had so much fun dancing to disco songs in between bingo games, but we didn’t win any money sadly. The winner went home with over $1,000 and cards were only $5 a piece, so that tells you just how popular this event is on the island. BINGO! Brian was the solo male among the ladies and he wore it well.
After bingo, we went to Cheeseburger’s for a casual dinner and drinks and shots of course. #adultpsringbreak My aunt creamed me in darts (I may have had a few too many rum drinks by that point…) and we scooted out just before the late night crowd arrived. We had to wake up fairly early the next morning to head out to Buck Island!
The trip to Buck Island is one of my favorite activities to do on St. Croix. The Island is untouched in its natural beauty because it’s a U.S. national reef monument, so no one can inhabit the island, and you can only get there by boat and stay for the day. My uncle captained us over to the island, as we got the day started with rum punches and Jello shots. The rum is ALWAYS free-flowing in St. Croix, that’s for sure! My aunt and uncle’s friends joined us on the trip, and they came stocked with three different kinds of Jello shots – oh my! Lime Jello with coconut rum, orange Jello with regular rum and red Jello with Fireball (my fave!). They know how to get the party started!
We had a blast on the beach just floating in the water at our makeshift swim up bar, inviting strangers to take Jello shots with us, eating the most amazing steak and Cuban sandwiches, and trying to empty out the numerous coolers we lugged along fully stocked. There is a great reef just off of the island as well, so we went for an afternoon snorkel and saw tons of lobsters. Literally, we probably saw 6 or 7, and those little buggers like to hide under the coral and rocks, but you can usually spot an antennae poking out and then swim a little closer to get a close-up. Then, when we returned from our little snorkel adventure, what creature has made itself a new home under the boat? A barracuda!! They are following us this trip, I swear. And this guy was huge, so I chilled on dry land until we were ready to get back on the boat to go home.
We also took a little walk around the Island and I of course had my roadie in hand for the trek.
On the ride back, Brian decided he wanted to tube. It’s not a really rough ride back, but it’s still the ocean and there are still waves, which makes tubing far more difficult than on the lake. He rode like a champ though, while I sat back and enjoyed the ride with my beverage in hand, of course.
That night we showered up and went out for Mexican and margs (because we really needed more drinks that day…). I had delicious blackened fish tacos and we ended a very #healthy vacation with some sort of fried chocolatey dessert – so good!
We were up early the next morning for what turned into a little travel adventure for our return trip home. We had rather limited options for the return, so we had scheduled a puddle jumper from St. Croix to Vieques (an island off Puerto Rico), then were supposed to take the ferry over to San Juan, spend the day in San Juan, then fly back to Atlanta through Miami. Well, our first flight to Vieques was delayed, but we still thought we would be able to catch the ferry. That is, until we arrived at the Vieques shack of an airport and realized that there was no cab line…a nice woman at the W Hotel check-in desk called us a cab, but it would be about 30 minutes.
Once we finally got in a cab, our driver didn’t really speak English, but I think was trying to tell us that there would be another ferry if we missed our original one. As we’re about to pull up to the ferry terminal, the boat is pulling out of the dock. We sit around in the terminal for awhile, until we can finally get a straight answer out of someone about when the next ferry will be. It was about 11 am, and the next ferry wasn’t until 3 pm…our flight out of San Juan was at 6, so that just wasn’t going to work.
We head back to the teeny Vieques airport and split up to try to get on a puddle jumper back to San Juan. There were about 4 airlines operating out of the airport and all the planes seated 6-10 people max. I hit luck with my lady at the Flamenco Airlines desk. There was a plane already boarded on the little runway getting ready to leave for a different San Juan airport, not the main one, but it would work. She called down to the plane and they thought they could probably fit us and our bags. Worked for me. I called Brian over and to save time the lady just let Brian type in all our information into the system. Five minutes later, sans any sort of ticket, we hopped on the plane and were off. I’m sure the other passengers were less than pleased to see us because they had been sitting in the stuffy plane on the hot tar mac for awhile.
By the time we got to San Juan, we were starving, so we just decided to take a cab over to the Marriott on Isla Verde where we had gone before to have lunch and hang on the beach until it was time for our flight to Miami. We looked pretty low-budge with our roller boards on the beach, but whatever – I’ll take more beach time if it means looking a little awkward. The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful, besides arriving at the airport way too early and having bad margs at the Airport Margaritaville in San Juan, and made it home sweet home just after midnight to see our darling Louie!
All in all, a great trip with a good mix of relaxing and activity and gorgeous weather! Our St. Croix hosts were the best and we can’t wait to go back 🙂
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