Caribbean Trip 2013 Day 5 (April 2, 2013): Beach Break

After a great day in Puerto Rico we are now on to our second stop of the cruise, St Martin. We went back and forth on the type of excursion we wanted to do in St. Martin and landed on the most popular excursion, which is called the Afternoon Beach Break. The excursion takes you to the very popular Orient Bay, which is supposed to be the nicest beach on the island.

But as you may have noticed we booked an “afternoon” excursion which meant we had the morning free. So in typical Joel & Jenn fashion we slept in until 9ish and barely made it up in time to order the breakfast room service. We have said it in past cruises but we never sleep better then when we are on a cruise. There is something too the fact that you are being rocked to sleep every night, and that we are lazy and love to sleep.

Regardless we had a super relaxing morning. For breakfast we went the smoothie route again, we love the banana smoothies. I had some fruit and Jenn had toast. After breakfast we got ready for the day and the first thing on the agenda was to do the self guided iPad Tour that started at 11:30. So Jenn and I promptly made our way down to guest services at 11:30 where it was completely empty and asked for the guided tour of the cruise ships artwork.  We got the iPad, which had an app on it that let you select art work near by and read up on it. What’s pretty ridiculous about the whole thing is that each art piece has a little plaque next to it saying almost the exact same thing. I tried to see if I could mess with the iPad and when I saw it was locked down pretty good I gave it back to Jenn who gave it back to guest services a few minutes after we picked it up. Jenn said Guest Services seemed a little perturbed that we only used it for five minutes, but oh well the tour was sort of lame.

Since the self-art tour only took a total of ten minutes we went out and explored the near by St. Martin. It looks as though this must be a recently built port. Next to us were two other giant cruise ships (one from Royal and one from NCL) and a ton of recently added shops and bars. It did feel a little like a tourist trap.

We ran out of things to look at within a half hour or so and headed back to the ship for lunch. We decided to head back to our favorite food stop so far the Bistro on 5 that serves crepes for $5 a person. We absolutely love the food there.  Jenn went with her same order as last time the egg and cheese crepe and a banana chocolate crepe for desert. I went different and had a spicy Italian sausage crepe and a Spanish crepe for desert. It was an incredible meal and given that we were on of the few occupied tables in the restaurant it was like we had it to ourselves.

After lunch we went up to the 9th deck to check out a little space called “Game On”. Think of it like those old Microsoft Surface concepts that they used to show. We sat down and tried to play a game like Marbles that didn’t work so we then changed to a very competitive game of checkers. I forgot how competitive we could get and we were we both out for blood in this game of checkers. Luckily for our marriage the time to go came and we both ended up with four kinged checker pieces. Let the records show we ended in a draw but that I Joel Szerlip was about to make a pretty stellar offensive that would have ended Jenn’s chances for victory.

We made our way off the ship and met up with our excursion group on the pier and made our way to the bus that took us to the beach. As you would expect the beach was stunning. The beach was all crystal clear blue water that was warm, not bath water warm, but warm. Jenn and I picked an awesome spot right up front with a nice umbrella that kept us from burning on top of our already pretty red burns. The excursion lasted around two hours and we were back on the bus on our way home. It was the perfect amount of time any longer and I think we would have been like lobsters.

After we boarded our cruise ship it was time to get ready for our first specialty restaurant dinner. Of the four this is the second most fancy of the four restaurants on board and is called the Tuscan Grille. We arrived around 15 minutes late to our 6:30 reservation, and didn’t get out of there until a bit after 8:30. The Tuscan Grille is an Italian Steakhouse and has a giant menu of selections. Since it’s an Italian Steakhouse we used our second bottle of wine, which was an awesome Cab from Australia. For our first course Jenn started off with the calamari and I went with filet mignon carpaccio. For our second course I went with the fried goat cheese salad and Jenn had her favorite minestrone soup.

For our main course we both went with the rib eye steak. However Jenn knows what she likes and so she asked for a side of the spaghetti bolognase with her pretty large rib eye and looked like she was in heaven. The pasta was to die for and the steaks were excellent. We also got a side of amazing garlic mashed potatoes.

After dinner we were dead tired and decided to skip out on the singers and dancers show and went back to our room. We ended up watching Hope Springs that was a pretty good movie and hit the sack after. It was an incredible day and it makes us both even more excited for tomorrow’s day in St. Kitts.