Friday, September 30, 2016

Nine Days in Paradise: Day 1

In January of 2016, my family and I chartered a catamaran in the Virgin Islands for a week. This article is one of a long overdue series of posts detailing the trip. You can view the entire series here. Over a period of a few weeks, new entries in the series will appear for your enjoyment.

When doing the preliminary planning for this trip, we were unable to find a flight that would get us to the boat early enough on Saturday to make full use of the boat and get to our first destination. Therefore, we chose to fly in a day early and spend a night in a hotel to get a full day on the boat.

We departed Baltimore on an early flight - with a layover in Miami. The flight down to Miami, the transfer, and the flight to St. Thomas were relatively uneventful.

At the airport, we gathered our bags and hailed a taxi to get us to the hotel. The ride across the island was interesting and it was great to see a bit of the non-tourist areas on our way to the hotel. The first order of business was to stop by hotel bar and get welcome drinks. Dylan and Mitchell had their first "legal" adult beverages, as the drinking age in St. Thomas is only 18.

The Marriott Frenchman's Reef
Dinner at the Sunset Grille
We stayed at the Marriott Frenchman's Reef, a very nice resort style hotel on the east side of Charlotte Amalie Harbor. Our room had a nice view of the ocean. As we were only staying a night, we didn't have much time to explore the resort or use any of the amenities (other than the bar). We had a very nice outdoor dinner at the Sunset Grille and then a late walk around the hotel before hitting the mattress. A long day of traveling and schlepping through airports had us all wiped out. Yet another good reason to fly in a day early!


Early to bed, anticipating a busy day on Saturday...

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