Thanksgiving on St. John

So, for Thanksgiving, Nick's family decided that they wanted to get away from the cold weather in New York. They decided that we should all spend a week on St. John, one of the islands in the US Virgin Islands. I had never been to the Caribbean before, but Nick's family's been to the British Virgin Islands before.

Our trip started by flying out Friday night on a red-eye flight to New York. I think I got 30 minutes of sleep, and Nick didn't get any, although he seemed to be very entertained by Iron Man. Thanks to some good tailwinds, we actually arrive at JFK 45 minutes early. In fact, we landed before 5:00, which is when the groundscrew starts their shift, so for a few minutes, we were at the gate, but waiting for people to guide us in and also for the jetway to be attached to the front door. Fortunately, it only took five minutes, but Nick and I were amused that we landed with, essentially, no crew on the grounds.

We then pick up our bags and then head outside to grab a taxi to Nick's parents' apartment. What Nick forgot was that we would need to be outside for this part and forgot to bring a jacket to protect him from the 24 degree weather in New York. So we scurried as fast as we could to the taxi line and got our taxi. After a couple of hours, the entire family headed down to St. John, where it was 80 degrees and sunny.

We didn't do very much on the island--relaxing on the beach, relaxing by the pool, going to the spa, etc. For lunch, we tried out the cafe on the resort. The food was fine, and Simon seemed to enjoy it as well:


I like how in that photo, there's a huge keg with the words "Cruzan Rum" on it.

The resort had tennis courts as well, so I signed up for some tennis clinics. With the exception of the first day, I was the only one at the clinics, so it was like I had a private lesson, but for a much cheaper price. It was good exercise, and with the high humidity, I was sweating after the first five minutes. The courts were also quite interesting. It was as if they wanted to be grass courts, but the resort didn't want to deal with the hassle of maintaining a grass court, so they used astroturf instead. I couldn't tell if there was a huge difference between playing on a hard court versus playing on an astroturf one, but it was still odd to look down and not see cement.

On Wednesday, we took a trip to St. Thomas, which is the most developed island of all the Virgin Islands. While there is a huge shopping district in Charlotte Amalie, we discovered that it was all jewelry stores, which didn't appeal to us too much. The "80% off sale" promotions really made us suspicious...why are they selling their jewelry for so little?

After some wandering around, we decided to head back to St. John. On our way to the ferry docks, Nick took a photo of the Moving Bar:


He didn't get anything from the cart, but I think he was amused that this man had a portable bar.

We were fortunate that we were taking the ferry during sunset, which allowed us to take this picture of us and Nick's dad:


Nick's dad seems fine and was happy to have the entire family together, so that was great news.

We also noticed the large cruise ships:


Seeing how large they were and how insane the city was when all the tourist descended on it made us less enthusiastic about taking a cruise anytime in the near future.

On Thanksgiving day, we went to one of the restaurants on the resort. They didn't have turkey, but they did have duck, which all of us agreed was much better than turkey.

It was a great trip, and the scenery was wonderful. There were some cloudy days, but the majority of the time we were there, it was sunny. And the sunsets were spectacular:


It was great having the entire family in one place again...and Simon was cute as always. We flew home to LA with Nick's parents because his dad had an appointment at Cedars-Sinai. The MRI showed no growth in the tumor, however, there is some small bleeding in the brain. I asked Nick if there was anything they could do for that, and he said that there wasn't. Hopefully the bleeding doesn't get too severe...