St. Croix..Sunday, 10-23-16

I have been to St. Croix before with Susan, Keith and Teresa and we loved it here.  Soon after we were there in 1998 the ships stopped coming here.  Regardless of the reasons, I am happy to be back here and Debbie has never been here.  We are on a tour that will take us all over the island.  We dock in Frederiksted.  We meet our tour group at 8:15AM and we are called before we even find a place to sit down.  Our tour guide for the day is George JR and our driver is Bobly…not Bobby Lee but Bobly.  I don’t know why I am so hung up on his name but I am.  This day couldn’t have been better…there was an 80% chance of rain and we could see the clouds forming but it never rained anywhere on our tour until we were back on the ship!  Usually it is Kay that has the good weather so maybe she has rubbed off on me!

The guide was very informative and we went to the rain forest (no rain) and saw mahogany trees, kapok trees and the tree of life (like the replica at Disney) called the Billabong tree.  We also went past the Domino Club on the outskirts of the rain forest.  This is the home of the “bear drinking pig”.  The family and I visited here on our trip and we had so much fun feeding the pigs (they are huge) beer that you have to buy from them.  The guide told all of the people on our bus all about it.  The tour took us to the other side of the island to Christiansted which is the capital city.  This island is a US territory and one of the US Virgin Islands.  In my opinion, this is the prettiest of all of the islands…cleaner and manicured and more well kept.  Beautiful flowers and the people are very nice and helpful.  The city names are derived from the Danes who controlled them for a good while.  They were also part of the slave trade.  The man who emancipated them was Buddhoe…Debbie and I thought it was Butthole so we thought it was funny.  George Jr later was telling us about the Spanish Catholics sailing to the island and trying to convert the island people to Catholicism.  Debbie and I asked if Butthole was a catholic and the whole bus burst out laughing…even Bobly thought that was funny.  Lastly, we passed the Captain Morgan Rum Factory but we did not stop to sample! 

The tour was delightful,  we had a great time and made it back to the ship just before the skies opened.    We met the people at the next table in the dining room tonight (really they are our table mates since there are two inches between their table and ours). Larry and Ann from Missouri.  We enjoyed talking to them and were the last to leave our section.  Dinner was good…I had seared Ahi tuna and Braised Beef Cheeks for dinner and Debbie had Zucchini beignets which were bland and she had chicken for dinner.  The beef was delicious and Debbie said hers was just ok.  We pulled away from the dock right on time just before six and the seas are smooth and have been since leaving San Juan.  After dinner Debbie and I went to production show then to the casino and were in there a few minutes when the Captain came on the PA and said we were headed back to St. Croix to unload a sick passenger.  So we visited St. Croix twice inone day!  Debbie and I went outside to watch as we came back in.  The police and ambulance were waiting on the dock when we arrived.  They put out the gangway without typing up the ship and soon they took the man off with his luggage…very sad.  As soon as he was in the ambulance, the gangway was pulled and we were backing away from the pier.  Interesting that in the dark we saw tarpon swimming from the promenade deck.  They were 3 – 4 feet long.  We saw them in Christiansted too.  George JR said they don’t eat them because they are very bony fish….very big too!  We met a lady named Cheryl  from  Alpharetta while out on the deck too.  After returning to the casino for a short while we decided to have a desert martini at the martini bar before heading to bed.  When we got there, the place was packing with people with this headsets on glowing different colors and they were all dancing.  Debbie and I looked at each other wondering what the hell was going on?  Well it was called the “Muted Dance Party”.  OMG..so fun and funny.  There were three glow colors…blue, green and orange and each played a different kind of music.  It was really fun but by 12:30 AM Debbie and I were whipped and headed back to the cabin.  Both of us were miserable after the chocolate martini we had and couldn’t take enough medicine to make it better.  Debbie said we were being punished for having so much fun that day.  We fought the indigestion until after 3 AM when we finally fell asleep sitting up!

Mahogany Tree

Kapok Tree

Domino Club where the beer drinking pig resides
 

Domino Club is a classy place!

Billabong Tree

Old sugar mill stack near Billabong

Sea grapes

Kayakers

Tarpin (or so we were told...they were huge!)

It was a really great day two!