At the start of summer, when Covid cases were falling and things were reopening and starting to look a little okay, I started entertaining the idea of a vacation. Iceland had gotten their cases under control and announced that they would be reopening to tourists with a strict policy – you had to test negative at the airport or go into a 14-day quarantine. I’ve already been to Iceland twice, but I love it, and it seemed like a safe place to be during a pandemic since we’d be staying in a camper and self-distancing in nature. I very quickly planned a vacation there, but right before I bought plane tickets, they announced that they would not be allowing Americans after all.
Damn.
But at this point, I was pretty set on some form of a vacation, so I started seeing what the options were. Turns out, not much. But the US Virgin Islands were open for business, and St. John only had two cases total at the time. So, with only two and a half weeks until the week I wanted to travel, I booked tickets, with layovers in Puerto Rico since that was the cheapest option.
Right after I did so, Puerto Rico announced mandatory negative covid tests for all arrivals. Since we had an overnight layover there on the way home, that meant we were going to have to somehow find somewhere on tiny St. John to get tested and get results back within 72 hours of leaving. And that just didn’t seem feasible.
So, I changed our flights to have layovers in Miami instead. And then, the USVI governor announced that he was going to require negative covid tests within 72 hours of arrival from tourists coming from hot spots, of which Florida was at the top. I was again worried about the specific timeframe (tests usually take 5+ days to get results back here), but I waited several days to get more information on whether this would affect me since we had an overnight layover in Miami before getting to St. John.
Finally, we were in luck and St. John was a green light, but they were announcing new restrictions in time for us to be there – beaches closing at 4 on weekends, bars closed (restaurants could still serve drinks; you just couldn’t congregate around a bar), and the possibility of a sudden all-out lockdown was mentioned. These were all things we could work with, so we made the decision to still go.
I purchased face shields on Amazon. I purchased new filters for our face masks. I purchased travel-sized hand sanitizer for both Anthony and me to keep on us at all times (and use very frequently). I purchased sanitizing spray so that we could wipe down anywhere we’d be hanging out. I purchased new glasses to protect my eyes and keep me from wearing contacts on the plane (contact-wearers are more likely to touch their eyes which are vulnerable to virus droplets). I obsessively checked our seats on all flights, changing them at the last minute to ensure we were surrounded by empty rows. On one flight, I even had to purchase an upgrade to preferred seats in order for us to sit alone. I recognize how privileged we are to be able to do all this without much thought.
We did a strict 3-week quarantine before the trip (planned on 2 but pushed the trip back a week while in the first week of quarantine), which is easy for us since we work from home and have grocery delivery available. And to be extra safe, I also got tested a couple days before departing, another luxury due to my flexible schedule and my health insurance that others may not have.
While at the airports and on the planes, we kept our masks and face shields on at all times and sat as far away from people as we could. When eating, we removed the face masks but left on the face shields.
Once on the island, we were happy to see that businesses and restaurants were strictly enforcing masks. The scuba diving company we booked with was only taking one party at a time, allowing Anthony and I to have private days of diving. A few beaches were busy, but none were packed by any means, making it very easy to social distance. We basically had the hiking trails to ourselves (apparently hiking in 90 degrees isn’t a very popular activity).
Whew. With all that out of the way, here’s how the trip went!
We landed on St. Thomas around 11 am, had our temps taken, were asked a brief covid-19 questionnaire, quickly hopped in a taxi across the island to the Red Hook ferry, arriving at right about noon but were still able to catch the 12:00 ferry to St. John. The ferry was short, and we immediately went to get some veggie burgers and drinks for lunch at The Tap & Still.
I called Lionel Jeep Rental to let them know we had arrived on the island, and she came to pick us up and take us to their office. We were given a beautiful coral gradient 2-door Jeep Wrangler. Most all tourists (and a good number of locals) drive Jeep Wranglers on St. John, so we quickly appreciated the unique color of ours, making it easy to find in a sea of otherwise identical cars.
We drove on up the hill – on the left side of the road – following directions to our AirBnB. Our AirBnB had a wonderful view on over Rendezvous Bay. We got settled in and cleaned up and just relaxed, enjoying our view for awhile.
Once Anthony was done napping (I’m an anti-napper), we drove into town to pick up some (very expensive) groceries and then over to Mongoose Junction, which is basically the only part of town where parking is free and somewhat easy. Anthony ordered some food to-go from Greengos, and I walked down the road to Our Market Smoothies to buy some fresh fruit smoothies. We met back up and headed home to enjoy our little dinner on our deck.
The next morning, we drove across the island to Coral Bay to meet up with our dive guide at Busy Bee Charters, passing a large trip of wild goats (yes, that is the right terminology).
They got us set up with our gear and my wetsuit, because no matter how warm the water is, I am always freezing by the end of a dive. We walked down to the boat as the rain started to clear off.
Our first dive site was Tektite, and it felt amazing to be back in the water, scuba diving after too long of a break. We saw all sorts of beautiful fish and coral. Some of my favorites that we saw in abundance throughout our dives were the beaugregory damselfish and various types of squirrelfish, which somewhat remind me of a Tim Burton character.
I don’t remember the name of our next dive site, but it had probably even more variety – cleaner shrimp, a large school of French grunts, parrotfish, angelfish, trumpet fish, trunk fish, the list goes on. We stayed under water for over an hour, and once we came up, we had a short boat ride back to shore.
We drove back across to Cruz Bay, ate lunch at North Shore Deli, and then decided to head to a beach for the afternoon before they closed. We decided to go to Trunk Bay, which is the most famous beach on the island. It was beautiful and calm and a great place to just chill for a while.
We left shortly before they closed for the day, rinsing off at the showers by the parking lot. We got a couple beers outside at Taproom and then headed back to our AirBnB to cook some dinner and swim in our pool a bit.
We slept in a little the next morning, wasting some time until a shop we could rent snorkel gear at would open. We went to Low Key to rent mask and fins for us both, and then we drove on up the North Shore Road to visit a new beach. We went to Maho, famous for its abundance of sea turtles.
We swam around the west side of the bay a bit, wondering where the turtles were.
When we didn’t have any luck, we cut across to the other side, suddenly seeing several of them, along with some big sharksuckers.
Didn’t matter how many I saw, every time I saw another one, I got all excited again like it was the first one.
All that swimming worked up an appetite, so we headed home to make and eat some lunch before going on to another beach.
This time we did Cinnamon Bay, which was beautiful, but it was very windy, and the water was choppy, constantly getting splashed up into my snorkel.
After a while of choking on salt water, I went back up to the beach, leaving Anthony to snorkel by himself. While he followed a school of blue tang, I watched a small group of teenagers drinking from giant glass bottles of liquor and chasing it with bursts of gymnastics on the beach.
We went home and got cleaned up, wincing over sunburns (note to self – apply sunscreen to butt cheeks when wearing a thong bikini to the beach for the first time). I put on a beachy dress and heels, which by this point in the pandemic were completely foreign to my feet.
We went to Lime Inn for dinner. They were only doing tasting menus at this point, but fortunately had lots of vegan options for the tasting menu. They had us sanitize our hands, and then led us to our table.
The food, drinks, dessert were all incredible, and I ate until I was the most full I’ve ever been. It cost an insane amount of money, but it was a much-needed night out, and I was happy we went.
The following day, Google led us astray while navigating to Francis Bay, and we ended up on the worst gravel road I’ve ever seen. I wasn’t sure we were going to make it, but our Jeep proved me wrong, and after all that, we were still the first ones at the beach.
We started out snorkeling on the west side, seeing lots of pretty colors, and then we cut all the way across over the sea grass until we got to the coral on the east side of the bay. And that’s where the magic was.
We saw more sea turtles.
We saw squid.
We saw a flounder.
We saw a half dozen rays.
Most exciting of all, we saw an octopus who came out and performed some tricks for the camera.
We spent a lot of time there, until we were exhausted and hungry.
We went back to Mongoose Junction to eat some lunch and do some shopping where I bought myself a rash guard.
It was hot, but we decided to do a short hike on the Lind Point trail down to the beach. Desperate for some air conditioning and something cold to drink after, we went to the grocery store. We grabbed some groceries for our evening of camping, and then went on our way to the Susannaberg Plantation Ruins, which was the general site of where we were camping.
I was worried it’d be overly hot camping, but on top of that hill with the nice Caribbean breeze, it was perfect. We took a cool outdoor shower, washed some clothes and hung them up between some trees, and waited for our host to bring us a cooler with ice to cool down some beverages.
At one point a group of deer came to visit us, and shortly after they left, we sat down to stare out at our sunset and sip some white wine.
Once darkness arrived, I pulled out my kindle light and read in the tent until I fell asleep. I opened the tent the next morning to take in the view and discovered we were sharing said view with a bunch of cows.
We had had such a fun time snorkeling at Francis Bay the day before that we decided to go back for more instead of trying out a different beach. While we didn’t see the octopus this time, it was still magical.
We went back to Cruz Bay for lunch and more groceries. Unfortunately, our restaurant options were dwindling due to some covid scares causing them to temporarily shut down, but we found some fresh healthy food at a little place called Shaibu’s at the shopping center we went to. We stocked up on groceries for the rest of our trip, and then drove across to Coral Bay to find our new AirBnB.
We pulled into our parking spot and took in our new home and its view, very pleased with our choice.
We decided to take it easy and just spend the rest of the day there, hanging out on our deck, cooking dinner, relaxing.
We woke up early enough to watch the sun rise, and then gathered up our stuff for a hike.
We drove over to the small lot for Salt Pond Bay, making it down to the beach in time for it to start raining on us. We sheltered underneath some trees until the rain passed about 5 minutes later, and then found our way to the Ram Head trail.
The trail was great, going through trees with views out over Salt Pond Bay, and then walking along a stone beach, and then up the hill, past cacti, until we reached the top, with great views all around us.
One of my favorite little hikes to date, probably.
We were hot by the time we made it back to the bay and wished we had brought our swimsuits to jump in and cool off. But instead, we kept trekking back to our car.
That afternoon we had more dives booked with Busy Bee. We went down to the boat and had a short ride to our first dive site.
I saw a couple really cool spotted drum fish, but Anthony had the camera and missed them. But our guide did point out a nurse shark, and Anthony caught this clearly very awesome picture of it.
We also spotted a pretty, sparkly juvenile damselfish.
We hung out on the boat for a while and then went on to our next site, Le Duc. There was a great variety of hard and soft coral here, and I excitedly pointed out a sea turtle at one point that our guide had missed. Anthony basically shook his head and rolled his eyes at me, as if I should be bored with sea turtles by this point.
Once we were done diving, we went home, got cleaned up, and headed down to Indigo Grill for dinner. They checked our temps and got us seated. We had too much food to eat so took some of it back home with us where we spent the rest of the evening.
The next day, we went to Annaberg Plantation Ruins, walked around and read the depressing signs.
The Leinster Bay trail started at basically the same point, so we hiked the 15 minutes along it with our snorkel gear until we got past the little beach. We dropped our stuff, got our snorkel gear on, and swam out along the shore. I thought I was getting all sorts of awesome macro shots of fish, realizing when going through the pictures later that I was somehow always aiming too high and to the right of everything I was trying to photograph.
We got cleaned up and went out for a very small lunch at Miss Lucy’s afterward, some little duckies coming over to beg from us while we were there.
That afternoon, we went diving again. We spent a long time under water at the first site, over an hour again. I saw some lionfish, a couple adorable porcupine fish, and at the end, we were surprised by both a barracuda and a stingray which seemed to appear out of nowhere.
We sat on the boat awhile, drinking sodas, telling stories, watching turtles peak their heads out of water here and there. And then we went over to Flanegan, a really, really cool looking dive site, both above and below water. Our guide told us he decided to send us off on a bang for our last dive. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out that way, or at least not as intended.
We cut between the rocks, enjoying the scenery, but pretty quickly, our guide was ascending, motioning that something was wrong, having us stop for a 3-minute safety stop. Once we reached the surface, he informed us he got “narced” – slang for nitrogen narcosis. I asked him how often that happened to him, and he said it was his first time in over 8 years of diving professionally. So, he stayed at the surface to guide us back to the boat, telling us we were fine to head back under water. It’s harder than it sounds trying to follow someone who’s 40 feet above you while also trying to look around and explore. We also hit a really strong current that had me feeling like I wasn’t even moving forward for the last half of it. We made it back to the boat, and he motioned to us that we were safe to just explore around that area for a while. After some time, we ascended on our own to join him back on the boat. He was apologetic, but we were just happy it wasn’t something more serious. They didn’t charge us for the last dive, which was unnecessary but appreciated.
We cooked dinner at home that evening and worked on a plan for the next day, our last day on the island. I researched best snorkeling sites on the island, and Waterlemon Cay, where we had been that morning, seemed to be the consensus. We hadn’t gone out all the way to the cay, though, so we decided we’d do that the next day.
So, we retraced our steps the next morning, hiking out a little bit further this time. I had somehow injured my foot the day before, so I limped behind Anthony the whole way. We left our stuff on the rocky shore, and swam out to the little island, me swimming with one foot and my arms this time. On our first pass around the island, we saw several large fish.
At one point, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shark in the distance. So, I took off chasing it, forgetting about my injured foot. I was clearly not going to catch up to it, and I got distracted by a really cool, large filefish below me.
We dawdled around some more, exploring, when I saw the shark, or another shark, a ways out again. So once again, I chased after it, quickly losing the race.
We made another round before calling it quits, swimming back to shore.
We hiked back to our car and drove across to Cruz Bay. We sadly returned our snorkeling gear and went to The Beach Bar for lunch and then spent the rest of the day, soaking up all the time we had left with our wonderful view at the AirBnB, along with packing and getting everything ready for the journey back home.
