St. Martin Vacay Day 3

Day 3 we crosssed from St. Maarten, the Dutch side, to St. Martin, the French side of the island.  The French side is soooo beautiful!  It seemed a lot more "resortish" than the Dutch side.  We found our way to Orient Beach and it was breathtaking.

The boys LOVED running through these waves that were much bigger than the ones on the Dutch side.  Also, on this side of the island the sand doesn't seem to drop steeply underwater - you can wade out quite a ways.

The boys could have stayed and run through those waves all day if we let them.  But it was a little scary having little bodies in such strong water.  Both boys got bowled over by the waves in the short time we were at this beach.

We soon headed to another place I had looked up as being a great place for young families, called Pinel Island. 

To get there, you take a short ferry ride across Orient Beach.

Pinel Island is a tiny island that faces the more popular Orient Beach.  Because it's facing a different direction, the waves here are almost nonexistent.  It also is very shallow - you can wade out 100 yards and the water is still only up to your knees.  It was the perfect place to just let the boys loose.  They could have free reign and we didn't have to worry about them.

We rented a couple of beach chairs and an umbrella and this is where Gracie spent much of her time because I was worried about all our prolonged sun exposure.

Gracen's a pretty fun girl to be around, though, so she kept me great company in that beach chair.

Jaron decided to build a sandcastle.  I had brought sand toys from Saba but forgot them at the hotel! So Jaron built this baby out of his bare hands and an infant spoon.

We had a great day on Pinel Island - I only wish we'd had more time to explore the French side!

Reliving it makes me wish we had had the money to do this more often during our time in the Caribbean.  Oh well, guess we'll just have to go back some day! ;-)

St. Maarten Vacay Day 2

I'm backposting for the first time in forever and it's driving me nuts!  But it's taken me awhile to get settled here - there just seems like there is so much to do!  Today I become the owner of a minivan.  I have a lot of mixed feelings about it but the overarching one is that I am officially now "old." 

Anyway, back to St. Maarten.

I had researched things to do with small children on St. Maarten before we went there.  The zoo had a lot of great reviews and offered cheap admission so the kids and I went to check it out.

We had SO much fun there!  The zoo is mostly full of tropical birds.  You can buy a bag of peanuts at the gate and feed them to the birds and it is such a great experience!  Alden and Eli could not get enough of it - we bought several bags!  The birds were so beautiful!

As you can tell by the kids' change of clothes, we had so much fun that we hit the zoo one more time on the morning we left.  Besides birds, there were several different kinds of monkeys (that also enjoyed the peanuts but were more fun to feed because they could catch the peanuts in the air!).  The zoo also had a few animals I've never heard of before but...I can't remember any of their names. :-)

And where was Jaron while we were enjoying the wildlife?

He was at the ghetto-est golf course I've ever seen. 

Apparently the course was hit by a hurricane...almost 15 YEARS AGO!!  And it looks like not much has been done to recover it.  But golf is golf, I guess, even if the fairways are covered in weeds and the clubhouse windows are boarded up.

The important thing is, Jaron got some MUCH needed R 'n R.

That night, we hit the beach again, despite the threatening look of a big, gloomy rain cloud.  We're just die-hards like that.

It got dark way too soon.  But don't worry, we hit the beach again the next day!

St. Maarten Vacay Day 1

On Monday (the day Jaron and I celebrated 7 awesome years of marriage), we took our family to St. Maarten to experience the vacation side of the Caribbean.

St. Maarten is an island split in half by two nationalities - half is owned by the Dutch and half by the French.

After arriving and getting a rental car and finding our hotel, it was almost dusk before we set out to explore the Dutch side's capital, Philipsburg.

But we made it to the boardwalk beach that was familiar to us from the day we spent here when we first arrived in the Caribbean.

And sweet little Gracen.  How she loves the sand.  But oh how she loves to eat the sand and therefore can not be seen on it without a pacifier.

The boys went wild in the sand.  They ran and chased and splashed their hearts out for the few minutes we had before it started to get dark.

We actually decided we kind of liked the beach in the evening - no crowds or sun blazing down on us!

Good-bye Saba

I am choking up as I write this post!

I can't believe that our time on Saba has come to an end.  I know a lot of you are probably thinking that I should be glad to move on since this experience has brought us so many challenges.  But I have grown so much during our time here!  I will forever be grateful for the things that these last 16 months have taught me.  I am definitely a changed person for having lived here and for what I've learned while here!

We hit the airport Monday morning.  In no time, our plane arrived to whisk us off the island for perhaps forever.  The finality of that is so hard for me to accept!

Before I knew it, we were whirring down the world's shortest runway for the last time.

And just like that, Saba was gone!

But we're not back in the States yet...St. Maarten vacation, here we come!