9-night Southern Caribbean Cruise on the Disney Fantasy Day 5 - St. Maarten
Sunday July 24 - St. Maarten
It is time for our first port of call! We had actually been to St. Maarten previously, but we did the underwater sea trek helmet dive so we didn’t really see any of the island, just the bottom of a little piece of ocean. This time we had plans to see the island with a buggy rental. The ship was cleared at 9:30 and we left shortly thereafter and found the guy that would be renting us our buggy. The rental process took a little bit of time, but we got rolling around 10:00. He gave us a map and we also had our phones loaded up with offline Google maps and we were pretty successful.
We only made two wrong turns, but realized it right away and course corrected quickly. We stopped at a couple of scenic spots and a couple of them we were unable to stop because of lack of parking, which was annoying.
Around lunchtime we arrived in the area of Maho beach where we parked the buggy (for $5). This is the beach where the planes land right over your head. We weren’t there for any of the giant ones, but we did see some smaller ones come in and it’s pretty crazy how close they get. The beach itself is tiny.
We ate lunch at a cute little vegan restaurant there and it was delicious. After lunch we hopped back in our buggy and again struggled with parking. Finally back in Phillipsburg, we found a place to park so we could check out the Yoda Guy museum which we found to be a bit overpriced so we didn’t actually go in the museum portion.
All in all, we enjoyed seeing the island a bit but it wasn’t as much fun as the Curaçao buggy ride we did. In Curaçao it really made a big difference having some off-road adventures and having the guide take us to different places and pointing out things of interest to us. And the rental in St. Maarten was comparable to the rental price in Curaçao but without the guide so I would say it was a little expensive. Also, we only drove on regular roads, so honestly, we didn’t need an off-road buggy. We would have preferred a regular car with AC and less noise and wind.
We returned the buggy and were back onboard around 3:00 in the afternoon. We were all a little windblown and sweaty so we took turns taking the shower while we waited for some room service (All Hands on Deck, fruit, and three chocolate chip cookies). After that, Emmaline wanted to go to karaoke and I said I would accompany her. Roger was uninterested so he took a walk. I sang “Spoonful of Sugar” and was offered a job onboard on the entertainment team after my performance.
At 6:15 we went to the show for the evening in the Walt Disney Theatre which was Buckets N Boards. They were a lot of fun and reminded me of Junnk (but I might like Junnk a little better). After the show, Emmaline wanted to meet Stitch so we did that greet and then checked out our photos from the night before in Shutters. We had one that looked good of the three of us so we made note of it to purchase later. On our earlier cruises we bought the photo package, but nowadays we usually just purchase one or two we really like. Before dinner, we did a little bit of shopping.
After shopping, dinner that evening was in Animator’s Palate and it was the rotational menu (black truffle pasta pursettes!) with the Crush show. We really prefer the show on the Classics. The Crush thing is gimmicky and we don’t really find it to be particularly entertaining. We were tired from our windblown day so we went to bed straight away (stopping for a quick pic when we ran into Stitch in the hallway).
Comments
Post a Comment