25 - 28 July

Wednesday 25 July.  St Thomas – Virgin Island.

Currency – American Dollars.

 St Thomas is in the Virgin Islands and was bought by the United States during the First World War for $25 million and is the home of the Cruzan Rum Distillery which makes Southern Comfort and of course Cruzan Rum.  The Islands were the home of many famous pirates including Blackbeard and Bluebeard and both of them have castles here.

It is famous for its duty free shopping, especially diamond and watches and there certainly were a lot of stores offering gems of many shapes and colours.  Yvonne, Pat and I caught the open style taxi into town and started a 3 hour shopping spree.  As you know, I am not a great shopper so I was bored in about 10 minutes and I didn’t buy anything. 

We decided on taking a tour offered by one of the locals and immediately started driving up St Peters Mountain which was almost 1500 feet high and the view was spectacular although some of the islands in the distance were hidden by sand in the air from the Sahara Desert.  

We saw on iguana which was extremely tame and enjoyed the cool mountain air.

Lunch was next on the agenda and we went back to the dock and went into a local pub and ordered fish and chips and several Light Buds, most enjoyable.  The girls bought some wine and I bought a Pandora bead for my bracelet, not a lot of room left on the bracelet.

It seems that the ship has taken up idea of Christmas in July so tonight we had roast turkey for dinner and after dinner we all went up on deck and believe it or not Santa came and we had snow.  Yes, snow came down from the upper decks and showered us with fine shaved ice and it just added to the atmosphere.  They tell me that on Christmas Day, they shower the inside of the ship with snow and it falls on the Christmas tree below.  It was a fun night and we danced in the beautiful sea air and had a great time. 

Thursday 26 July – Caribbean Sea. Beautiful weather, calm seas and we are still having the special quarantine restrictions which are really hard on the staff and passengers, the Captain dropped hints that we may be back to normal after the Panama Canal.  Hope so.