Beaching on St. John

Kati and Monica at Maho

After a long day of boating, we decided to take it kind of easy on Monday.  We slept in and then caught the ferry over to St. John for a beach day.  St. John is cool and I think that I prefer it to St. Thomas.  The Rockefellers used to own the whole island and, when they donated it back to the United States, they did so upon the condition that a certain [large] percentage of it would remain in the National Park System.  Thus, the vast majority of the island is untouched.

From town we took a safari out to Maho beach, which was virtually empty compared to Trunk Bay and Cinnamon Bay, both of which seemed to be peppered with tourists.  The only problem with Maho was that the tide was coming up and the beach was very short.  By the mid-afternoon our spot had changed twice due to the rising tide.  Yet the tide didn't interfere with our frisbee, so we didn't mind too much.  We stuck around at Maho until about 3:00 when, because of a lack of safaris, we started hiking back to Cinnamon.  As we reached the Cinnamon parking lot, a safari was pulling out and we hopped on only to find out that it was filled with a bunch of tourists from Raleigh.

Alex, Wes, and Me at the Beach

We spent an hour or two relaxing in Mongoose Junction at the local "brewery."  The word "brewery" is used loosely down here because their beer is actually brewed and bottled in Portland, Maine.  They can't brew their own beer down here because they don't have enough water to see them through the process.  Nor do they have any of the facilities.  Alcohol production is strictly limited to rum for these reasons.

Alex, being the important businessman that he is, had a few meetings Monday night with "Asia" so he dropped us in Red Hook for the evening.  We ate at a place called Big Bamboo.  It wasn't bad and Kati has since become obsessed with their Chicken Roti, a signature West Indie dish.  After Big Bamboo we pretended we were locals and spent the rest of the evening at XO Bistro, Alex's favorite spot.  Alex finally finished being important around 11:00 and not long thereafter we called it a night because of the promise of a big day lurking right around the corner.