The Hebdons: Virgin Islands

We decided to take a second honeymoon to the Virgin Islands during Curtis's school break in June.

It was fantastic!!! Not only was the trip wonderful, but it was AWESOME to have TWO FULL weeks of having Curtis all to myself!

We stayed with Allie the night before we flew out of NYC. I hadn't seen Allie since we got married in August, so we were up super late talking and catching up. I ended up getting a half hour of sleep that night. Curtis went to bed a few hours earlier than that but was still super duper tired because we had to be at the airport at 4:30am for an early flight. As we sat waiting at the airport, Curtis couldn't get comfortable. Out of desperation to get a few minutes of shut eye, he decided to squeeze between the airport seats to lay down for a little bit.

He was exhausted.

The first island we went to was

St. Croix. The picture on the right is the Carrington's Inn. It's a cute little bed and breakfast we found with raving reviews. Really nice place to stay. On the left is the view from our room.

We spent the majority of our time on St. Croix going in circles and turning around. Ok, not really, but I think within the first half hour of driving, we had turned around at least 5 times. The roads are not marked well at all and the maps didn't match the road names, making for quite an adventure. Maybe it was a combination between poorly marked roads and a very amateur navigator.

(I use my GPS, not maps.)

The first beach we went to on St. Croix was Shoy's bay. It had this neat tunnel of trees that you had to go through to get to the beach. There were only about 10 people at that beach that day.
The water was crystal clear and it was really relaxing.

Shoy's Bay

You can see how we're pretty much the only people on the whole beach.

We hung out at Shoy's for a few hours and then decided to go discover other parts of the island.

St. Croix is only 28 miles long by 7 miles wide so you wouldn't think it would take that long to drive around, but it does. Curvey roads with lots of pot holes, plus we were constantly doing U-turns. One day we ended up driving on dirt roads through the rainforest. That wasn't the plan.

The pictures below are part of the view on our drive around the island.

This is the balcony of our bed and breakfast. There were little geckos all over the place.

Our second real day there we went on a sailing and snorkeling tour to Buck Island. Buck Island is an uninhibited island that the National Park Services monitor. Off of the island is a snorkeling trail. We snorkeled for about an hour. We saw all sorts of marine life including a huge lobster (looked like Sebastian from the Little Mermaid!), eels, barracudas, and tons of colorful fish and coral. It was my first time officially snorkeling, so I was still kind of getting used to everything. Curtis, our course, is super duper adventurous and wants to go off on his own and into the tiniest places. I, on the other hand, did not like to be in any place where I didn't feel like I could put my feet below me and fix my goggles.

After snorkeling, we took our sailboat over to the island and anchored in the sand. We ate lunch on the boat and then went and walked around the island for an hour or so.

It was the most white sand with clear water I have ever seen in my life.

Buck Island was absolutely beautiful. I could've just stayed there forever.

This was a fort that was in the city of Christiansted.

After a few days of staying at the bed and breakfast we moved to another part of the island to be right on the water. This is the view from our balcony. It was a really nice location.

The sunset off of our porch.

Our last few days while being on St. Croix we spent at different beaches.

We rented a jetski the one day and I may have thrown both Curtis and I off of it.

After about 5 days on St. Croix, we took a small plane up to St. Thomas. (Small as in, you don't go through any type of security, they ask you your weight so they can balance the plane and luggage, there were only 6 passengers, and the Captain was only 2 seats in front of me!) From St. Thomas we took a ferry over to St. John. Most of St. John is a national park, so it's taken care of really well. We didn't find one pothole the whole time! We stayed in an Eco-tent sort of thing. They are glorified tents on a hill. In order to get up to the tent you climb 100 stairs and then there are wooden paths between all of the tents.

It's kind of like a gigantic treehouse!

It was totally solar powered. Here's a picture of our kitchen. When you would use the sink or the toilet, the lights would dim for a few seconds.

There was also a shower that was heated by the sunlight.

This is one side of the bedroom area. There were screened windows on the part of the tent facing out towards the water that could unzip to let the trade winds in. We obviously didn't have air conditioning, but you can see the tiny fan above the bed. Luckily it stayed pretty windy. We even had two intense lightening and thunderstorms with tons of rain at night.

Our little porch.

The view

More views from our porch.

This is a view in the other direction. The first night we got to our eco-tent we hiked down to the bay in the picture below. Since the sun was starting to go down we were the only ones at the beach.

We snorkeled there for a little bit and then just swam.

We had a really nice sunset and enjoyed having the beach to ourselves.

The picture below is Trunk Bay. This was an actual National Park and they had a really nice snorkeling trail. This was probably the busiest beach we were at the whole time, but we still found our own space. We made friends with some fish, who continued to swim around and around our feet every time we got in the water. The snorkeling here was really cool too. We saw tons of different colored fish and some really neat coral.

The pictures below are views from pull offs on the side of the road.

We LOVED St. John. It was a very peaceful island and we enjoyed the quietness of it. We would both have to say that it was probably our favorite of the three islands we went to.

We wish we would have had more time there.

After a few days on St. John, we went to St. Thomas for our last night. We had to fly out the next morning from St. Thomas so we wanted to already be on the island. We stayed at a Marriott there right on the beach. This was the only "resort" we stayed in the whole time. On St. Thomas there were actually big waves that came in to the beach. Curtis spent some time body surfing and I spent my time swimming over waves before they crashed.

(I've had too many near death experiences when I was little body surfing that I refused to do that now.)

A view from my beach chair.