Day 1: St. Martin

We decided to rent a car for our first day in St. Martin. Jaren did some research and found an awesome car rental company! We didn't do the whole airport car rental process. We found a guy who met us at the airport, picked us up and drove us to our hotel. Sounds like a taxi, right? Almost. But once at the hotel we got to keep the car and then he had a co-worker come and pick him up so the car was ours to use until the next night. We stayed at a resort that night called Little Divi and it was on the Dutch side of the island. We got there with plenty of time to swim in the ocean and then go out to dinner. For dinner that night Jaren and I bought some delicious grilled chicken from a road side stand and the boys walked across the street and picked up subway sandwiches. We finished our night with some super yummy gelato from Carousel (thank you Casey for that recommendation). The next morning Jaren took the boys to look around the resort while I packed up the bags and car and then we headed out to find some breakfast. While looking for food we stumbled across a dive and swim shop and we stopped in to pick up some boogie boards in hopes up finding some good waves this trip. We grabbed some really good french breakfast pastries and baguettes from a little French shop, even though we were on the dutch side of the island. After that we headed to Maho Beach. This was the one stop I knew I wanted to make that day since I didn't know if we would have the chance once we were on the sail boat. Maho Beach is also known as airport beach because the airport is literally right behind the sand to the beach. The airplanes coming in to land fly directly over the beach and extremely close to the people playing and sunbathing. 

This is at one of the restaurants right on the beach. It's a big surf board that has all the flights listed for the day so you know what time an airplane is going to be landing. Or in other words, flying right over your head. 

This road is the only thing between the beach and the airport. You can see the sign is telling you to be careful of airplanes that are going to be taking off. Their jet streams can be pretty powerful! 

My boys watching in anticipation and then Caleb spotting an airplane in the distance. 

Ordering some virgin pina coladas. Yummy! 

The boys were dying to use their new boogie boards and so even thought the waves were tiny Jaren headed out with them and taught them how to catch a wave and ride it back to shore. They had never done this before and they had a blast! It did not matter to them if the waves were small. They loved every second of it. Caleb cried when it was time to leave. The following pictures were taken with my phone in zoom. They didn't turn out great but they were cute enough to post on the blog!

After Maho Beach we headed over to the French side of the island and picked up some lunch at Sarafina's in a city called Marigot. St. Marten is a very unique carribean island in that half of it is Dutch and the other half is French. I had no idea before I went how different that would make the two sides of the island. The change was kind of unbelievable! The Dutch side is similar to what you would picture of most Caribbean islands. Beautiful beaches and resorts but once you go inland it's a different story. The French side is totally, 100% French! The people speak French. The food is all French. They don't like American tourists. That side of the island was clean. There were minimal toursists, in fact, I don't really remember seeing any. I felt like someone had picked up a coastal town from France and dropped it in the Caribbean. While our food from Sarafina's was delicous I felt incredibly uncomfortable eating there.  After we ate lunch we drove back over to Oyster Pond (French side) and checked in with The Moorings to get our boat. Once done with all that we got back in our car and headed to Le Grand Marche to do our grocery shopping for the week. When we were walking into the grocery store we stumbled across none other then Elizabeth and her family, our sailing companions for the week! When we got back to the boat the car rental guy was there waiting to collect the car. If we ever do St. Marten again I will remember to rent a car that way. Not having to drop it off at the airport was such a nice convenience. With everything pretty much done we were ready to set sail early the next morning. 

The boys at Oyster Pond carrying their boogie boards down to the boat.