1st Cruise, 1st Trip Report: A Tale of a Little Bit of Sea Sickness (Or A Lot): Cruise Day 4: St. Maarten!!!!
CRUISE DAY 4: ST MAARTEN!!!! (With dinner at Palo and Pirate Night!)
My excitement for this day was solely based on the fact that I absolutely love watching airplanes, and I had only recently in the past few years heard about Maho beach (aka airport beach) and had added visiting this beach onto my bucket list. SO we didn’t have any excursions booked, and decided we were just going to wing it all day.
Ahh, land! We walked around a bit and looked at the many shopping stalls. Then we followed all the people out of the terminal and we just wandered inland a bit more.
We quickly reached this empty beach, and in all honesty we were really excited to go and play in the ocean. So we parked ourselves down to sunbathe a bit and Theo and I took a dip in the ocean.
You can’t tell but our heads are poking out.
You can also still see the cruise ship terminal in the background.
At some point, we decided to explore the coast along the beach we were on, slowly making our way to Maho beach. (At the terminal we saw some water taxi services that offered rides to Maho, but we didn’t think we needed to take those.) Eventually we got to a weird wall of shrubbery and rocks, and we climbed around it. Suddenly there was a security guard on us telling us we weren’t allowed in. Turns out we walked onto the private beach of the hotel that was on the beach. While we were getting escorted onto the road away from the beach, we asked the security guard in which direction we would have to walk to get to Maho beach. He laughed at us and told us that it was on the other side of the island and it would be best to hail a cab.
WELL that was a lesson for us to do our research before just “winging it” haha. Luckily since we ended up wandering to a hotel, there were plenty of cabs available. The cab ride took a good 20 minutes, that went over a mountain to the other side of the island. It was a pretty cool ride, we got to see the amazing scenery.
A photo from the window in the cab.
As the taxi was pulling in to the beach, it was quite neat. You could tell we were nearing because the airport runway was fenced off to our left side, and we kept driving closer and closer to the coast. When we finally arrived, it was clear that this beach is a very popular destination. The beach was LOADED with people, and there were wanderers everywhere. We decided to take some seats at the restaurant bar on the beach just to gather ourselves while we ate some lunch.
The food on the menu was the usual beach food: hot dogs and pizzas, and burgers, and some bigger meals including ribs and the like. We mostly just had hotdogs and burgers. The bar was quite informative too, because they have a chalk board with a list of all the different flights coming in and going out. We watched the remainder of the morning flights out of the island take off while we ate our food. So, after lunch we made our way down the steps to the beach and planted down on a spot closer to the water, as everyone else seemed to be higher up closer to the road.
Maho beach is a smaller beach, with the actual beach sand area being rather narrow. The beach itself is fenced off from the road, and from there slopes down towards the water.
As with most public tourist attraction beaches, umbrellas and lounging chairs were available for rent. We were cheap so we sat on our towels.
Look at how crowded the beach was!
And then…. finally… our first excitement was coming. We were waiting patiently and watching the sky for an incoming plane. AND HERE IT COMES!!!!
In this photo you can see the giant wave coming in, and some people already getting knocked around.
Here it comes!!!
So much excitement.
After these photos, another big wave came. And this was when we discovered why most people were sitting as high up on the beach as possible. The water runs up VERY HIGH onto the beach. We screamed and scrambled to grab all our stuff before it could get washed away!!! Two of our four towels for completely drenched hahaha. We spent a lot of our time on the beach watching the planes come in (most of the planes were smaller, private charters. Only a few actual large commercial planes fly here. Nonetheless it was an amazing experience. On the beach we also watched and laughed at the people getting wiped out by the huge waves and getting swept down by the intense undertow.
We all spent some time swimming as well, and in all honesty the waves weren’t too bad when you’re actually in the water.
Here is a photo from my GoPro while I was in the water with a JetBlue flying in.
Here is an American Airlines coming in.
And finally. The jewel of the day was flying in. The big one that everyone has come to see: The KLM double decker! We already knew from the chalk board roughly what time it was to be flying in, so we waited impatiently for it to come and here it was!
It’s here!!!
It’s so large that you can’t even fit the entire plane into the photo haha
(In the full size photo you can even see faces in the windows.)
Everyone is on their feet with their cameras and phones and even tablets in the air!
After the excitement of the KLM coming in, Theo and I decided to go and swim around in the ocean some more while Glendon and Sam sunbathed on the beach. A couple of smaller planes came in. There seemed to be a plane coming at pretty decent intervals. We didn’t have to wait all that long to see another one come in.
We tried to get an “airplane hat” photo but Glendon being quite a bit taller than me…. this was the best that we got hahaha.
When we decided to finally make our way back to the terminal (we were worried about being back late so we decided to head back a touch early) we just went to the area with the abundance of transport back to the cruise ship terminal. We hopped into a van with a few other people, and headed back. Driving past the runway again, we saw a TON of people lining up against the fence staring at the KLM…. we totally forgot that the KLM does a departure as well and that this was another moment people wait for. Dang! We got to watch it take off the runway as we drove past though…
Another view from the ride back to the cruise ship terminal
Crooked photo.But there are the ships!
The 4 ships here at the same time and all the people heading back
When we got back on deck, I liked the look of the sunsetting behind this Norwegian ship heh heh.
The ship on our other side
After getting onto the ship, we relaxed a little bit before getting ready for our dinner at Palo!!! We had chosen this night because since it was Pirate night scheduled, that meant it would have been pirate themed dinner at the regular dining restaurants. Glendon had been on previous cruises and wasn’t really into the pirate dinner, so he chose this night for our formal dinner at Palo!
Unfortunately, when all the food came out, we were all so hungry and so excited to eat everything (I think we did a sampling of all the appetizers we wanted to try… so about 4 of the appetizers I think…) that I forgot to take photos. But everything was so delicious!!! Theo, who’s a bit of a picky eater, loved his food. Sam, the chef, was so happy with his entree!!! Glendon had his usual favourite, the tenderloin. I wish that I had a copy of the menu so I could list off all the items we had ordered,
Here are the TWO photos I took this night.
Sorry I didn’t get any other photos, I was not prepared. After dinner we went back to get into our pirate gear… which is to say we changed out of my formal attire and into comfy clothes, and threw on the complimentary bandana and then headed onto deck. We watched the Pirate show on deck (which I thought was loads of fun and I wish I got myself a video of it….) and then enjoyed the fireworks!!! We didn’t really take part in the dance party afterwards though, just walked around a bit more and checked out the buffet at Cabana’s to see how many people would be snagging turkey legs for the night.
We finished up the night with watching the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie on Funnel Vision until it was over and then went to bed.
(Lesson learned for future reports… Always keep a camera on myself for everything and if I like something, take a photo and video.)
