USVI-On-Line

You may wonder how our 5th vacation to St John can be a trip of firsts but after reflecting on it (over and over again!) we realized that we managed to see and do a lot of new things this time around. I am not good at writing so I will try to make this as painless as possible. Let me set the stage. This was our FIRST ever 2 week vacation. The first week of our vacation was spent with our 22 year old son, 26 year old daughter, and her boyfriend. The second week they left and we had friends join us for the 2nd week of our adventure.

We started our vacation with a FIRST, a one night stay in STT since our villa was not available until the next day. When we met up with our daughter and her boyfriend at the airport we enjoyed another FIRST. They announced their engagement! That was exciting but we went our separate ways for the afternoon because we had booked a night at Emerald Beach and they stayed at Frenchman's Reef. We decided that we could not wait to get all the details until the next day so we met for dinner at the Sunset Grill at Frenchman's. While we are not fans of STT I will say it was a relaxing way to start vacation.

View from room at Emerald Beach We rented a car from Amalie, another FIRST, based on the everything we read on this forum. The reviews were spot on. Great service and the vehicle was like new. Sunday morning we woke up, ate breakfast and made our way over to Red Hook. The "kids" took the passenger ferry while we took the car ferry.

Our kids The newly engaged couple We met our villa greeter and picked the rest of our group and headed to Coconuts. Caribbean Villas was very accommodating to let us drop our things off at the house before check in time. When we got there we were greeted by Kevin aka Coconuts and his lovely wife Danielle so we not only got the tour from the villa greeter but were also treated to a personal tour with the owners. The best was the surprise that my kids had waiting for me. They had made arrangements with Kevin to have a Sloop Jones shirt for me at the house as a belated combination Mothers Day/birthday present! After all this excitement we quickly dropped off our things so the cleaning people could work in peace and headed to the beach.

I am so excited to have more trip reports to read. I have a rare hour to myself and poured a glass of wine and opened up the forum!

Congrats on the wedding. I hope your future SIL got STJ.

Very cool, we stayed on STT in 2010, it was a good time...STT is the real deal...the thing I didn't like was the traffic.

Thanks for posting will read the rest of your firsts...

Can't wait to keep to reading more firsts!!