jwg

What we do: every day is about the same. We get up and go to the dining room for breakfast, joining other people and chatting for a long while. We always get the special of the day (it was eggs benedict twice). Then we return to the room to brush teeth and change to bathing suits. We walk down the hill and grab a couple of lounge chairs and sit on the beach staring at the view or reading. Then a swim or snorkel. Before you know it is time to walk back up the hill, change out of bathing suits and go to lunch having a beer. The bar is do-it-yourself and write-in-the-book. Then lunch with a bunch of people. Back to the room for a short nap.

Bathing suits and back to the beach for staring, swimming, and reading. Sometimes we play croquet. The field (rough) was setup for 6-wicket croquet which I'd never played. At some point we converted it back to 9-wicket croquet. (When I was a kid we had croquet set up in our side yard and I played a lot.). Back up the hill for showers and sitting on our porch to watch the sunset. Then down to the main house for a cocktail and chatting with people. At some point someone comes in and says: "dinner is ready to be served". For dinner there are two choices which you select at lunch. Wine is at the table. Lunch is a buffet. The food has always been very good here. They do seating assignments for dinner to help mix up the guests (you can elect to eat privately). This time there were not many people so we ate at one table (8-12 people) but mixed up the seating each time. After dinner it is back to the room to read and then sleep.

It's nice that basically you have almost no decisions to make all day. The only decisions you have to make are what kind of beer, what cocktail (always a rum drink the first and last night) and the dinner choice, and whether to swim or snorkel or both, and which path to take to go to and from the beach

One of the things I like to do at the beach is watch the pelicans fly, nest, and dive. This time I didn't get any good pictures or videos of pelicans diving. An interesting thing about the pelican dive is that they usually turn around just as they hit the water and pop up facing the other way. It is hard to discern exactly hood they do it.

Click here for a few pelicans


I describe this place as "there's nothing to do and not enough time to do it". We didn't do any hiking - other walking to the beach for which there are several trails and routes in addition to the road. We didn't even have time to go to the museum (a little shack with various artifacts). On other trips there have been boat trips to other reefs, sunset cruises around the island.

This time we stayed only five nights but arrived at ~9 am and on departure day we left at 3:30 pm. So we really had 5 1/2 days there. Our habit is to fly to San Juan the night before, stay in the airport hotel, and fly on the first plane to Tortola - a short boat ride gets us to the island in time for breakfast.

We had a sunset to watch every night - our porch faced west and you can see Jost Van Dyke as well as other parts of the island.
Click here for some views from our porch: