Virgin Islands National Park (#48)

Sunday, June 13, 2021

 We left our house this morning around 7:15 to catch our 10:30am flight to St. Thomas – after our very close call flying to Nashville for Spring Break, we decided to give ourselves plenty of time!

We had no issues with the airport or the flight – it did take off a little bit late, which of course, made me nervous because the person I’ve been dealing with to plan this trip had freaked me out about missing the ferry to St John.

I watched the first two episodes of Ted Lasso on the plane and that show is great!

The kids did great and slept some and the flight was long – 5 hours.

We landed in St. Thomas on time, deboarded the plane into the outdoors, which is always cool and something the kids had only done a few times, and breezed through the whole COVID screening process.

Let me back up a bit.  This trip, which I booked in January, shortly after my dad died, had been a little bit more logistically challenging than any trip we’ve ever been on before.  We all had to get negative COVID tests and log them into a database (then wait to make sure everything went ok) then show these QR codes on our phones to people at the airport after they took our temp.  We don’t have to do anything to get back on the plane. 

We breezed through this line, literally in under a minute and our suitcases came record fast too.  I was the 4^th or 5^th person in line at the Avis rental car stand and the line was not moving at all.  Turns out they over-rented cars so even though we got there at 5 pm and had a valid reservation, we were told to wait an hour and that they’d call me.  I was stressed out – last ferry to St. John leaves at 7pm!  So, we went to the airport bar, got a stiff pina colada, Nick got a beer, and we waited.  About an hour later, she called me, we ran to the counter, got the car (which was better than what we rented – a Hyundai Tuscon rather than a Hyundai Sonata) and hit the road (with less than a full tank of gas 😊)

And then we began driving on the left-hand side of the road to the ferry.  And what we heard was correct – the drivers are crazy!  Nick drove the whole time which was good because once we got to the ferry, he had to back the car all the way to the very back of the ferry.  I would have freaked.  But oh my, the ferry ride was stunning.  Note the beautiful sunset!

We arrived on St. John at 7:20 and it was dark – like fully dark, sun totally set.  Bianca and her son escorted us to our stunning house.  It’s about a 7 or 8 mile, very scary drive to the house.  As we pulled up, it was like pitch black dark, and Bianca informed us that the power was out on the entire island so she and her son showed us around by flash light.  It was eerie.  There were amazing sound coming from the trees and she told us it’s all different tree frogs.  It’s a bit unnerving not really being able to see the house you rented.

We needed to grab some groceries so we drove into Coral Bay (which is basically the town we’re staying in” and went to the Love City Mini Market, who seemed to have a generator.  The food was shockingly expensive - $12 for a bag of apples.  Very little vegetables, bad selection, all strange.  So, we grabbed some basics and went back to the house.  Now here we sit in a house we can’t really see and have just learned we have no running water because it runs on an electric pump.   

But we made it.  I will not die without seeing Virgin Islands National Park!