Getting ready to head North
Scott-Free’s blog
Steve & Chris
Mon 2 May 2011 14:38
Monday 2nd May
2011
We've spent the last
few days in Charlotte Amalie getting a few jobs done, shopping in the
chandleries and KMarts and riding around the island on the local buses. These
are trucks with open sides that would definitely not pass Health & Safety
rules back home!
The inverter which
we use to charge the laptops gave up on us shortly after leaving St Martin,where
we could have easily and cheaply bought a replacement.We have been to numerous
places here in an attempt to buy something that will suffice until we can
replace the inverter. No luck as none of the adaptors will fit our nine-year-old
Dell workhorse.
I have treated
myself to some new shorts- not before time as the arse is hanging out of most of
those I already own. Steve also has some very smart check shorts
-typically American!
We ate out at
Shipwreck on the first night and the burgers were so huge we didn't need to eat
until lunchtime the next day! We also spent a very enjoyable evening in
Greenhouse where the cocktails are two for one, with the guys from Flying
Cloud and Nimue.
Rick (Branson?!)
& Lucy (Flying Cloud), and Anne
(Nimue)
2 for 1 cocktails during Happy Hour...
It's carnival week
here now, which doesn't seem to make much difference during the day,but boy does
it get noisy at night! Not surprisingly there is a large empty expanse of
water in the part of the bay nearest to the shore, but even out in the middle we
can feel the boat vibrate with the 'music'. Today there were three cruise
ships on the dock when we woke up - they seem to slide in silently in the night
and then disgorge their thousands of tourists onto the island for a few hours
before slipping back out again. Locals say that they are killing the
tourist industry on the islands because they are so well fed and watered onboard
that they don't spend any money ashore. They visit so many duty-free
places that they don't spend anything in those shops either, so they are not
that popular, especially as they take holidaymakers that might at one time have
spent a whole holiday on one island.
Our plan now is
to do a supermarket run to stock up for a longish passage- not because we
necessarily are going to do one, but because we've been advised that if we stop
in the Turks & Caicos or the Bahamas prices are high and availability
limited. We need to fill up with diesel which is very cheap here - $4
a gallon, and then it's just a matter of waiting for a weather window and we
will be off.
Internet access here
has been surprisingly poor, and we're not sure what it will be like until
we get to the US coast, but we will press the satellite phone into action for
email if need be.