Our Arrival

Last Christmas my parents invited us all to come to St. John for a family vacation in June. Of course David immediately went online to get our tickets and we have been anxiously counting down the days until this much anticipated vacation.
Monday, June 23: Yeah!!! The trip we've been waiting for finally arrived! We left Baltimore early, early Monday morning to head down to the Washington DC Dulles airport. All went well with traffic, parking, and getting through security. Noah seemed to be just fine when we strapped him in for the flight...but the calm didn't last long. Needless to say, Noah was less than fun on the flight. Poor David had to take care of him since Noah does not like me at the moment and my helping only made things worse. Xander and Savannah were just fine, of course.


The flight from DC to St. Thomas was just under 4 hours. Once we arrived, we collected our baggage and headed out to the taxi vans to take us to the other side of St. Thomas, called Red Hook, where we would catch a ferry going to St. John. The van ride is never fun and Noah continued to yell out his objections to this whole trip. Eventually we made it on to the ferry and sat on the upper deck for a few minutes until the pouring rain drove us all inside. There were a few moments on that ferry ride that I asked David if he thought it was possible for the ferry to tip over...that boat was rockin'! Some of the tourists were screaming while the locals just laughed at us. I guess if it had been the locals screaming then I would have had reason to be nervous.

At last....St. John! It's quite the trip to get there but so, so worth it. St. John is one of the islands that makes up the US Virgin Islands located in the Caribbean. Rockefeller bought the island way back when and designated most of it to be protected national forest. Thank goodness for that because it remains a beautiful, tropical paradise with not a whole lot of people. It's definitely a slow-paced spot but that's why we love it so.
The house we stayed in this time was La Papaya and is definitely my favorite.

The view from our deck was breathtaking!

I had the "privilege" of driving one of the rental cars up to the house since we were the first to arrive on the island. I will NEVER drive on St. John again! You drive on the opposite side of the road, like in England, but that wasn't what got me...it was the hills and switchbacks that were too much for me. I was driving up one hill and could not see the rest of the road on the other side until I was already going down it...it was scary!!!
We hung out at the house waiting for everyone else to arrive. What a wonderful reunion! We were so excited to be with our family again.
That night a massive storm hit the island and the electricity went out for about an hour and a half. Not too fun especially since we couldn't use the water during the outage either for fear of burning the water pump. Well, that's life on St. John...a primitive paradise.