St. Thomas morning
Today is Saturday, 2/5/2005
I was up at my ordinary pre-dawn hour, but with no treadmill, no laptop and not wanting to inhale the ship's exhaust on the track, I am out of luck for my usual activities.
I am back to the room to get Debbie out of bed and in the shower before room service breakfast is to be delivered. We have arrived and docked early and we both slept soundly, so if there was anything going on last night we could not report on it.
Room service is on time and Debbie is fed and dressed by the time they call us to the Constellation Center to collect our passports and clear Immigrations individually. The Center is right off the atrium outside our cabin door and we are the first ones there.
We go back to the cabin and watch the dock area wake up and plan our day. This is the only place where Debbie has something big she would like to do. Sea Trekkin' at Coral World. We both love aquariums/marine parks so this should be fun. I am not too sure about the helmut diving, but the one time Debbie ever took a vacation without me, she went to Bermuda and came back with nothing but a t-shirt for me, a tan and one Polaroid of her holding a big fish on the bottom of the ocean with a big smile on her face and a big helmut on her head! (You have to know Debbie to know how out of character all of this was, flying alone, riding in a small boat, and getting in the ocean! She is terrified of fish, when she showed me that Polaroid, I asked where is the guy holding the gun to your head to force you to do that, she smiled and said, just out of camera range. What the....? She never went on vacation without me again, anyway.) So, if she could do helmut diving, so can I. We get our suits on under our clothes and head out. We get another shared cab/van here and off we go. We arrive at Coral World after an exhilarating van ride, up, down, sideways, hairpin turns, ruts, pot holes, flooded streets, I am not sure we will ever get where she expects to go, but she is following along on her map and shows me the route as the we change route #s and she cranks up her Relief Band. We pay admission to Coral World and not Sea Trekkin' because she says they are not answering the phone. We go out to the undersea observatory and go down to view all the views and come back up and still no one is there for the Sea Trekkin'. We start to walk back to the front gate and we meet a woman on the bridge and ask her, she says Sea Trekkin' is cancelled due to rough water. Phew, I am relieved because I thought the fish were swimming backwards through those undersea windows, until Debbie pointed out they were being swept forward and back past the window by the water! I was worried, but they are don't so I don't have to either. Debbie seems disappointed. But, she rapidly checks her Coral World handout and tells me we are in time to see the feeding at the Caribbean Reef Encounter and leads the way. It is very interesting, not too busy and we get to speak with a couple of the aquarists.We go check out the ray pool, sea turtle pool, then go to the shark feeding. It is too hot, full sun and too many little kids, we leave pretty quickly and head for the Marine Gardens. It is a pair of buildings filled with small display aquarium tanks, we see sea horses, jawfish that dig holes with their shovel jaws to attract a mate, anemones, eels, and one room of fluorescent sea life blacklit. We really like it. The next 2 feedings were cancelled because of the rough water. So, we finished up the park, put our stuff in a locker here and walked over to the beach for a while. I went in and Debbie did not, it was really rough. We sat on the beach while I sundried and then went back over and I showered off and changed and we caught a cab back to the pier.
Again, it was a shared van. There were already 6 people in there, 4 going to the cruise ship docks and 2 going to the Ritz Carlton. So, this meant for the same low $7 per head price we got a circle tour of the entire eastern end of the island. It was another exhilarating ride but we were prepared this time.
