A little bit of France, in St Maarten!

-
Next we stopped in Marigot. I think this stop was one of the main reasons I wanted to do this tour! There's just something about this market area that I felt like I wanted to experience. It's not the typical cruise port shopping area, it's just a bit more than that. It's French, very French! And that's just unique to me. This tour gave us the drive around the island, the photo stops, the beach and time to stop here. I'm not a shopper at all. At least not a vacation shopper. I collect magnets everywhere I go, and maybe get a necklace or some other small thing, and by necklace I don't mean an expensive one, I mean something more handcrafted. Maybe a t-shirt...so I don't go to the ports for shopping and bargaining, but I wanted to come here. Maybe this was why?

Everytime I read anything at St. Maarten, Sarafina's came up! 

Alex doubted me...remember he's a picky eater. And for some crazy reason he doesn't really like pastries or believe it or not chocolate! So this entire place really had no appeal to him whatsoever! But I dragged him in and afterall, I did say he has some sense of adventure so, he didn't complain!

We decided to get a "grilled three cheese and mozzarella panini" - apparently mozzarella is not really a cheese on the French menu! It was amazingly good! Alex and I split it and we also got these...

YUM! They were amazing! And since he doesn't like that kind of food, I got to have both. 

They had a great selection to choose from



And those are only a small section of the items. 

After our short little lunch break, we went over to the vendor and craft type market. One side of the street had stores and more of restaurant type places, and then over on the water side there were vendor type stands. We went over there and got a couple of small items. No one was pushy and there were some nice jewelry stands and many other stands. We didn't walk through the whole place but only walked through to get back to our van. I'd say all in all we had maybe an hour in Marigot.

When our time at Marigot was up we wandered back to our tour bus. It was a successful trip there! We had gotten our French lunch, complete with macarons! I got a lovely handmade necklace made of some type of sea shell found in the Caribbean.


It was time to move along! We left the French side and crossed over into the Dutch side. Again we got to hear all about crossing the border between countries and the differences between the governments. It was pretty fascinating! Our driver again did a slow drive so we could take pictures of the border.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

San Pedro, hustle and bustle!

-
Image
Ambergris Caye…it’s an interesting place to be! As I mentioned in some previous posts, we chose a resort to the north of the town of San Pedro. Portofino is only accessible by water taxi and it’s about a fifteen minute boat ride to get there. But when you get into the heart of the island the pace of life picks up. It’s still a sleepy island town by all means. But there’s much more hustle and bustle! The first thing we noticed was the primary means of transportation are golf carts. There’s a few taxi vans, but most people are driving golf carts. This is certainly unique! There’s a certain charm about this for sure. Our main reasons for going into town were to get to the dive shops, but that only brought us to the docks…to eat lunch and dinner once or twice and the obligatory souvenir shopping. We didn’t get a chance to really see any of the other hotels in the area. In my obsessive research before the trip, there were quite a few that looked nice, but now that I was there I
Read more

You'd better Belize it!

-
Image
That's right - Belize.  The first question so many people would ask was, where's Belize? They hadn't even heard of the country!  This was common I found because Belize was formerly known as British Honduras and didn't change it's name until 1973.  The second question I was asked was why do you want to go to Belize?  Belize suddenly began popping up to me in my obsessive travel research about two years ago.  I had been planning our second trip to Costa Rica and kept seeing great travel information about Belize and of course I wanted to see what was the big draw!  K and I have been to Mexico several times and had been to Costa Rica once previously and since I was planning our second trip to Costa Rica I kept Belize in the back of my mind for a future trip.  I started to do some research and found Belize has the second largest barrier reef in the world!  Now that's something!  Neither K nor I dive, but we both enjoy snorkeling so right there that was a great opp
Read more

A Beautiful Morning

-
Image
Imagine opening your eyes and seeing this.... Imagine that! I woke up early one morning and pulled back the cotton curtains to see if the sun had risen up above the sea yet, and this was what greeted me. I just had to grab my camera! I went out on our porch and sat there just in awe of the beauty of the place we were. How lucky we were to be here! How lucky to experience such beauty! I snapped a picture with my cell phone to send home to the kids. I wished they were here to share this moment with me. There were so many parts of this adventure that they would love, and yet so many parts that would be enjoyed so much more in a few more years. The timing just wasn’t quite right yet. I enjoyed this amazing sunrise alone…I didn’t wake up K yet. He wouldn’t quite appreciate the beauty of it the way I did. He was sound asleep still. He’d enjoy it in a picture. For me, my day was already perfect.
Read more