Vacation - Part 2

The adventure continues...
We got up on Wednesday and walked into town to pick up our rental car. It was a snazzy bright yellow jeep wrangler. It was really pretty nice, so we headed off to town with me shouting reminders of "drive on the left" and trying to read the map of how to get to the grocery store with all the one way streets. We made it to the store and bought our snacks and sandwich supplies for picnic lunches for the week and worked on making our way back to Lavender Hill. We decided that was maybe enough driving for the first day and planned to walk a "short" trail to the beach. While the trail was only about a mile long, hiking in the tropics at noon takes a bit more effort than we planned for. I'm pretty sure all of my sun tan lotion was sweated off by the time we made it to Salomon Beach. We made a mental note that we need to be in better shape and do some training before we go back to St. John. Our first snorkeling adventure was great...saw all kinds of little fish and some pretty good sized parrot fish. The reef was really close to the beach so it was easy swimming and there was some nice shade to relax in on the beach. Once we got our snorkeling fix in, we wandered a little further down the trail just to see what all we could see. We saw another beach, Honeymoon Beach, as well as the Caneel Bay Resort - where the rich people stay. We hiked our way back to Lavender Hill to clean up for dinner and walked into town for our first meal out. We saw this cute place just down the street that we hadn't heard about before coming, but it looked good. It was Cactus on the Blue and we had a great meal. We started with a salsa sampler - four different little things of salsa with chips. There was a guacamole, a mango pineapple salsa, a pico de gallo, and some kind of roasted tomato salsa. There were fabulous! I love chips and salsa and I was starving from all the hiking and swimming, so it was a great start. I followed with some chicken tacos and Brad had some kind of flank steak. There was really no food left on the table when we finished :) We then wandered around some of the shops by the ferry dock, scoping out who had the best t-shirts. We retreated to our condo for our nightly routine of reading up on beaches and trails for the next day, watching the cubs, and reading our novels. It was so wonderful to just have some time to read. I read two novels, four magazines, and the better part of my two books about st. john during the trip.