Five Fabulous Years=7 night cruise to the Southern Caribbean

We got in the night before our cruise left San Juan.   Of course we headed straight to the beach once we got to our hotel.  When we left the hotel we went the wrong way (on my suggestion) and ended up taking an hour detour.  Once back on course we thought we were much closer to Old San Juan than we were, so we walked much further than necessary looking for food.  We ended up eating at a mexican restaurant that over looked the ocean.  Their mojitos were excellent!

Our first stop was Tortola, BVI.  We took a taxi to the beach from the ship. 

The beach we went to was slightly crowded where the taxis dropped people off, so we headed down to the end of the beach right under a palm tree with plenty of shade.  Andrew quickly got us a bucket of beer (delish) and we proceeded to chill.  The island to the left in this picture is Jost Van Dyke, Andrew thought it was pretty cool since he had heard about it from my Dad and one of his favortie singers talks about it in his songs.

Tortola, that island out in the distance is St Thomas

Our boat

Welcome sign St Maarten, the Dutch side of the island

Andrew heard about this beach, Airport Beach, from one of his co-workers.  It is literally at the end of the runway.  The only thing between the beach and the runway is a little 2 lane road.  It's pretty cool.  Unfortunetely there was a big wave that got all of our stuff wet including Andrew's phone and our camera.  We were able to revive our camera a few days later, but his phone didn't make it.

There is a bar right on the beach and they have this surfboard with a list of all the commercial arrivals.  Of course there were plenty of private planes landing as well.  The bar also had speakers so you could listen to air traffic control

Plane!

BIG plane!

This is a beach in Antigua.  We took the picture with a disposable camera that we bought at one of the stores.  We were amazed how many guys were out by the ships trying to sell us taxi rides.  It was ridiculous!  I would say that Antigua was our least favorite stop.

St Lucia.  We decided to save ourselves some taxi money and walk to the beach.  We didn't really know where we were going, just that we didn't want to pay anyone to take us there.  About halfway to the beach this guy came up to us and said he would take us to the beach for $10.  We told him no and he got upset.  He said we didn't know where we were going and that the beach we were headed to didn't have security and that this is how tourists get their watches stolen.  We kind of just laughed and kept on our way.  Good thing neither one of us was wearing a watch!

This is the beach we ended up getting to and it was great!  There weren't many people around, just the people from the all-inclusive resort (which wasn't much) and there was a security guy (first time seeing that at a beach).  It rained for 5 minutes later in the afternoon, so we took up shelter at one of the umbrella's from the resort.

Our last stop, Grenada, West Indies.  It's almost to the equator and Venezuela!

This is the beach we went to, it was a nice short water taxi ride from the ship (which you can see in the background).  This beach was big and pretty busy, but we tried to walk down to the end to get away from everyone.

Andrew wanted to rent a chair on our last day since we had been thrifty at the other beaches.  I was game until I heard that it was $5 and I said forget it.  He said it was the best day!

Back in San Juan we had 7 hours until our flight left so we hiked to Old San Juan from the Condado area, and it was one hell of a hike!  It took us MUCH longer than we thought it would, and it was HOT!!! but the views were pretty and lunch was great!