A day on St. Maarten

Another lovely island and another lovely day.  We shared our tour with a couple of young Brits who were as delighted by our tour and tour guide as were we.  St. Maarten is half Dutch and half French.  Our guide was from the Dutch side and told us all about the relations between both sides of the island.  Our guide was great about stopping at beautiful views and making sure we got in the shots.

We headed over to the beaches on the French side of the island with amazing surf and gorgeous views.  He told us all about the US airstrip on an island nearby used in WWII.  The airstrip was most recently used by drug runners until the islands nearby tore up the landing strip and positioned obstacles to deter landings.

Our first stop was to visit with a friend of our guide.  This man was a self taught expert on sea life and, while we have lived on the Gulf for about 15 years now, we got to hold live specimens that we had not seen before.  The young Brits enjoyed it even more than we did.

 Our next stop was up the road a bit to meet some other friends of our guide.

From the iguanas, we head to the beach for an hour or so.

While Gene lounged in the shade with a local brew, I played in the waves.  The young British guys took pity on this old gal and let me hang out with them for a bit.  The changing rooms were very nice and the whole place was so beautiful!

We stopped to get pics from both sides of the dividing line and then it was on to the rest of our adventure.

The airport on St. Maarten is renowned,  The planes approach directly over a beach (high tide so it was hard to see more than rocks) and we were just in time to witness this phenomena 

Before we knew it, our day was drawing to a close and our guide took us back to our ship through some beautiful country.

Next, and last stop, Tortola