We had a great two weeks in St. John! The weather was as expected — mostly sunny with an occasional rain shower and one full day of rain. And it was hot! In the 90\’s every day so we enjoyed alot of time in the water. Our villa, Hibiscus Gardens, was beyond perfect for us. A one level, two bedroom house with a pool. It was equipped with everything we could have asked for and more! We would stay at Hibiscus Gardens again in a heart beat.

The beautiful thing about going back to St. John is that nothing really changes. Everything is just as we left it, other than the addition of a traffic circle. There are still no traffic lights on the island. We know exactly where to go to see, get, or do whatever it is we need to do. We even recognize alot of locals from our honeymoon 10 years ago.

We enjoyed most breakfasts at the house, other than our \’St. John Breakfast of Champions\’ which consists of Hercules Pate and Rum Punch. A Hercules Pate is an island favorite that is similar to a large empanada but better. You have to get there early in order to score one before they run out. A great on-the-go breakfast on the way to the beach. All of our lunches were beach or poolside and then a handful of dinners in and out. Our favorite dinner spot continues to be The Beach Bar where we can pull up a table on the sand, enjoy a couple of beers, eat dinner, and watch Quinn get head to toe wet playing in the ocean. Dinner at The Beach Bar is always accompanied by lots of salty locals. Don and I also enjoyed a couple of dinners out by ourselves which was very nice.

We spent most of our days at either Trunk Bay or Maho Bay, but also threw in a couple of other beaches. On our last day on STJ we headed to Trunk Bay and were overrun by cruise ship passengers. They come in swarms and leave when the whistle blows. We had the misfortune of seeing a drowning victim pulled out of the water that day. He happened to be floating very near to where we were sitting but unfortunately there are so many people face down in the water snorkeling that this guy went unnoticed. We were underwhelmed by the life guard\’s response once they did notice him. They worked on him for quite some time on the beach but he didn\’t appear to make it. A bittersweet ending to our trip.

We headed over to St. Thomas the day before our departure and stayed on STT for the night. In previous years it has made the transition to getting home much easier, but was probably a little much with/for Quinn. But, we enjoyed the day by the pool sipping tropical rum beverages and checking out the hotel\’s local iguana population.

As you might expect, I took hundreds of pictures. I hope to get alot of them posted on a site where you can flip through an album, but I just haven\’t had the time. I will also need to make a separate blog posting with all the details from Don\’s Beach-to-Beach Power Swim. Lots of fun pictures there 😉

But, here are some of my favorite pics from the trip.

Maho Bay Baby Toss!

And Don got a glimpse of this shark swimming right off the beach at Maho Bay. This picture is actually the opposite of what it looks like. The shark was pretty small — maybe 2 – 3 feet long. But he hung around for quite some time cruising up and down the beach just a couple yards from shore in the shallow water.