Saturday, April 29th Toronto –> Antigua –> St. Maarten

We hopped our Air Canada flight to Antigua and on our final descent, we could see the smoke or steam or whatever it is coming out of the volcano on Monserrat (note to selves: scratch that daytrip – there really isn’t much left of that island at all). Also, we saw the beautiful turquoise water and glowing white beaches of Antigua.

 

The heat was like a wall of steam and the wind at the airport when we ‘de-planed’ threatened to blow our goofy hats right off.

It was Antigua Race Week when we arrived and if you look closely at the photo below you can see the funky outfits the girls were wearing at the entrance of the airport – they were giving away rumpunch at the door but I was still too paranoid about Hepatitis ice cubes (I got over it).

Anyway, we were able to bypass customs and connect directly (well after a bottle of ‘Carib’ beer each and a pleasant chat with a lady from Anguilla) through on our Liat Airways flight to St. Maartin.

Once we arrived at the Princess Juliana International Airport in St. Maarten, we cleared customs in about 2 seconds, grabbed a taxi and headed off to the Summit Resort Hotel on the Dutch side. We were a little nervous as we had just booked whatever was cheapest on expedia.com for the first night just so we wouldn’t arrive homeless. But we were skeptical… visions of a Dutch Basil Fawlty….

Our taxi driver was a REAL character, a hard-working, straight-talking local mother of 3 with those great big funky fingernails favoured in the various islands throughout the Caribbean (I LIKE ‘em). She said her husband was having an affair & they lived in the same house but weren’t speaking to each other.

She said she thought the other woman was a fool to go out with him considering he wouldn’t even get a divorce for her.

I agreed. Fred nodded and smiled throughout all the girl-talk, tried to say as little as possible.

We bandied about our various thoughts on the rights & wrongs in this situation, philosophizin’ as she drove us to our hotel. We asked her about gas prices and she gave us the same puzzling answer that everyone in the isands seemed to have: don’t really pay attention.

Seems in St. Maarten, among other places, nobody pays too close attention to what they pay at the pump. They are utterly unlike North Americans who will drive all over the place wasting gas to get a cheaper per-gallon or per-litre price tag.

Anyway when we arrived at our hotel, she whipped our baggage out of the back of the taxi with great aplomb, long, funky fingernails and all & we said our goodbyes.

She was really cool. I already like St. Maarten more.

Anyway we checked in and to our DELIGHT the place was fine and jim-dandy. It happened to be “Happy Hour” when we arrived so we went down to the Kissing Fish Bar and it was a PARTY! Seems people go and stay at the Summit Resort year after year (it is so great) and at Happy Hour every night everyone goes down for their favourite refreshments and de-briefs about their days … we met so many great people there!!! New Yorkers, Floridians, even another couple from Vancouver

Chloe & Thierry ran the bar & grill there – what a couple of characters! Chloe’s American & Thierry is French-Swiss.

Next time I’m in St. Maarten I have to remember to bring some kind of fish ornament… you can’t see too well in this photo because it was at night, but they have every manner of fish paraphernalia dangling all around the funky tikki bar.