St Thomas May 18th, 2009

St Thomas was the first port that we stopped in. Pulling up to the dock and watching as the little blurbs of color dotting the hillside became homes was pretty exciting. Even though sleeping in might have been nice, I didn’t mind being up to see that for the first time. That morning we had ordered the continental room service breakfast, and ate it as we sat on our balcony absorbing the island surroundings.

After breakfast, we decided to do a little shopping. St Thomas is supposed to have some of the best shopping in the Caribbean as it is a duty free port, especially if you want to buy jewelry. We didn't ended up buying much, other than this Olympus Tough camera that I had been wanting to buy. It’s waterproof up to 10 feet, shock proof, freeze proof up to 14 degrees, and a number of other features that I had been eyeing. It was a little bit cheaper in St Thomas, plus it came with a carrying case, and a memory card that holds like 1200 pictures. I am a reformed believer in digital cameras. Up until about 3 years ago, I was pretty adamant that film cameras were far superior to digital, but that changed when Tony got his camera in Ireland. Now I love how convenient they are, and they do really take high quality photos.


Other than that we didn’t do much in St Thomas. We had plans to go to the beach, but were suffering still a bit from sleep deprivation, so we decided to just relax on the ship for the remainder of the day. I kind of wish we had gone to the beach anyway, because without that, my overall opinion of St Thomas is that it wasn’t that impressive. Nice island, just kind of plain.


Dinner that night was our first assigned seating dinner. We had a quieter table on the upper part of the Atlantic dining room. Two other couples sat at our table, and we were lucky enough to all get along very well.

One couple was from Texas and the other from New Orleans. I liked hearing about what they did at each port and then just chatting each day.
Later Tony and I went to the theater to play the Battle of the Sexes game. The room was split into men and women, with each side collectively trying to answer trivia questions that the other gender would know better. I hardly knew the answer to any of the questions, but it was still fun. Some of the girls got real huffy about the whole thing, but in a friendly competitive spirit.