Wednesday Dec 10, 2025
Hi All! We are still in the USA! Well, again sorta… we are in St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands and it is an unincorporated territory of the United States. So close enough! Specifically we are docked in the Capitol city of Charlotte Amalie. We’ve both been here before (yep, there’s that blessed or spoiled thing again!) but we’ve never been here together so that’s fun.
St Thomas is the gateway isle to the US Virgin Islands. The other two islands are St John and St Croix. St Thomas is known for its beaches and snorkeling spots. Charlotte Amalie was founded by the Danish in the 1600’s and is a busy cruise ship port. One of its historic buildings includes a 1679 watchtower called Blackbeard’s Castle in reference to the area’s pirate history.
One of the most famous beaches is Magen’s Bay and sitting high atop looking down on Magen’s Bay Beach is an actual green bench called Drake’s Seat. Legend has it that Sir Francis Drake had it constructed since he used this spot as a point to survey the horizon for approaching enemy ships.
While St Thomas is beautiful, it has become very crowded with tourists and the close by island of St John is more manageable since it’s mostly a National Park. Our plan was to take an excursion thru Holland America to tour St John but we were waitlisted for it and never came off the waitlist. So our Plan B was to do another Holland excursion called St John on your own where they’d give us a boat ride to St John and we’d have a few hours to explore on our own.
Well, as they say, the best laid plans… our boat to St John got half way there and had boat trouble so we had to turn around and go back to the pier. They didn’t have another boat available and there were no other Holland tours available so we had to drop back to plan C! Lol
Plan C was we walked around the pier area and did a little shopping and lots of people watching. There were 5 ships in port with over 20,000 people so there was LOTS of people watching!! As I said, this is a very busy cruise port!We should have known when we woke up what the day would bring. It started off rainy (first rain we’ve seen this trip!) but we saw two different rainbows when we docked so we felt that was a good sign. Nope! It ended up being partly cloudy most of the time we were out but we did get poured on a couple times. I was also hoping we could find at least one pot of gold under those two rainbows to help pay off our around the world cruise! Nope again. Lol
So we got back on the ship and had lunch and relaxed for the afternoon. While it did rain off and on at least it was 80 degrees which is a lot warmer than back home! I’ll do another update after dinner tonight. Happy Hump Day to all!
The Wandering Italian 