St. Barth's

These photos did not load in order and with island wifi I'm lucky they loaded at all. So expect me to jump around a bit...consider yourself warned. :)

We got up early (for vacation) and headed to Philipsburg to catch a boat to St. Barths for the day. The ferry ride was only about 40 minutes but the sea was very rough and it was like a roller coaster. We sat on top of the boat with a family we met from New York City. The lady, I didn't catch her name, quickly became my best friend. She held onto my leg because she was panicked. Her panic assisted me as I focused on her instead of my own fears and seasickness. We finally made it after talking NFL teams with the locals (big fans here!) and praying for the ride to end. 

Our view of St. Maarten from the bumpy boat ride

We were amazed to pull into St. Barths and find so many HUGE yachts docked. You've never seen anything like it. When we first got off the boat we walked down the harbor looking at all of the fancy boats and were impressed to see that they all had candy out with Christmas greetings. Friendly rich people aren't all bad I guess. It was like trick-or-treating in paradise. Odd and lovely at the same time.

Yacht row

We got to the island and noticed EVERYONE was on a scooter or ATV. We thought they may be on to something so we found a little storefront renting them and signed up. I was admittedly a little nervous about tooling around town all day on an ATV, but they gave us awesome helmets and assured  us we'd be fine. Clearly they didn't get the fact that since all of the roadsigns are in French we had right at NO idea what the laws of the roads were. Whoops. Even the waiver we signed was in French.

Note: St. Barths feels much more like a foreign place from a language perspective than St. Maarten does. Everything is written in French. There are occasionally English subtitles, but not often.

Our ride for the day: an ATV

Anyway, Jackson yelled out "YOLO" (You Only Live Once) as he does sometimes when he is making questionable decisions and we were off to explore the island. It turned out to be a lovely decision. We had a blast.

Ok, now is where photo order will not make sense. I'll just do captions and let the photos land as they may.

View from Saline Beach

Limousine tender- the boat that comes to get you to take you
to your yacht. Some ladies got in, but we didn't recognize them
as celebs. 

The sun going down from St. Barths

Another sunset shot

Again.

Yachts all lined up

An adorable church about to have services for Christmas Eve
(We had a boat to catch or we would have stayed to attend!)

Life in a screensaver!

Swimming at Eden Rock on St. Jean's beach

Jackson just had to go jump off that platform.
I believe he yelled "YOLO" as he did it. ;)

St. Jean beach

Eden Rock restaurant at St. Jean's beach

More St. Jean beach views

Rocky terrain near Saline Beach 

A better view of the little church

My view from the back of the ATV

Saline Beach again

Lunch at an amazing French cafe with this cute boy!

Our lunch was awesome. We eat had panini sandwiches made with fresh meat and that most amazing cheese with this sauce that I cannot pinpoint but was yummy. They served french fries ("freedom fries) but I think that was only because we are Americans. HA! I got iced tea which came out as fizzy peach tea, but it was amazingly delicious. They also had the best ice cream ever. We each got a dish of it after acting out that we wanted a dish and not a cone (ha- language barriers are not an issue when you can act out what you want with your hands!). Our waiter was a hoot as he was working on his English and insisted we teach him the work for dish. No free refills in this land so all said and done our little lunch was around $50. WHOA! It was tasty, but that was a surprise!

The world's second largest yacht's tender

The view from lookout point

GET MORE HANDSOME, JACKSON

We loved the view of the sailboats

The guy we rented the ATV from marked out a map showing us just where to go for the day. The first place was lookout point. It was just incredible. I'd never seen such lovely views with my own eyes. We hung out there for a bit before heading down to St. Jean's beach. We'd heard good things about the area and it exceeded our expectations. The water was just so beautiful. We swam around and played in the waves for about an hour before getting back on the road.

From St. Jean we went to Saline Beach. It was almost deserted when we stopped in. We swam around for a bit before getting back to the ATV. It was so fun to beach hop! We then circled back to town for lunch. You read about that above. Ohhh blogger.

We read that Gouverneur beach was worth the drive so we made it. It was awesome. The place was pretty much just ours. We spent a lot of time there before filling up the ATV and returning it to town. We sat at the harbor and watched the yachts and tenders until it was time to return to the boat. The ride back was much more smooth and it was just gorgeous. The weather was perfect and the sky was clear. The stars were amazing and it was the perfect end to the most fun day ever. We cannot wait to go back to St. Barth sometime soon!