Day 7- St Marteen

St. Marteen was amazing! Our plans changed a little bit once we got off the boat. We had planned on doing a zip line tour, which included lunch and a hike. But when we got there, we learned that it was under construction and closed. So, we decided to rent a car and drive ourselves around the island.

If you look close, you can see someone washing the windows on the front of the boat!

Again, the beaches were just stunning!

While everyone else was snorkeling, this pelican hung out by me for about 20 minutes! I got to watch it fly, dive down in the water and come back up with a beak full of water and fish. It was a very large bird.

We were trying to find a beach with good snorkeling. At one stop, some guys showed us an island and for $20 per couple they would take us out there and pick us up 3 hours later. The ride out there and back were a little sketchy! The guys drove us out there on Sea-Doo's (Korby and I on one and our friends on the other Sea-Doo with the other driver). The two guys were as high as a kite! They were racing each other all the way there and on the way back as well~ and racing on 3 seated Sea-Doo's with impaired judgement made for a crazy ride for us! They were jumping each other's wakes and trying to swerve into one another, all at full speed. We were getting a couple feet of air on some of the jumps and there were a couple of times that Korby (sitting on the very back) almost fell off from bouncing so far off the seat. But we ended up with our own private beach! And I was told that the snorkeling was amazing~ Korby even got to swim with a sea turtle.

This is a picture from a cave on "our island" looking back at St Marteen. It was a fun island to explore. I found so much coral and a whole pile of conch shells. I brought one back for Shayden that was about a foot long! It is beautiful!

I started taking a photography class right before we left on vacation, and one of the accessories that our instructor talked about was a polarized filter. It is supposed to take away some of the light reflections. In this picture it is amazing to see what taking away the reflection of the sun off the water and clouds does to the color of the picture!
We ate lunch on the beach and this was the view from our table! I could really get used to this! There was a strip of shops along the beach and now I know what I want to do once Korby retires~ open up a little gift shop on the beach in the Caribbean!

At every port the ship just dominated the entire scene!

We ended the day with a little bit of shopping. A lot of it was either tourist junk or very high end merchandise. But we did find a linen shop that I could have spent hours in and way too much money~ so it's a good thing that we had a time limit to get back to the ship!

It was about this point where we realized that the week was going by way too fast. I also realized that although there were moments where we thought about our kids, we really weren't missing them at all! (Is that bad parenting, or just the effects of a really great vacation?!)