MarkandJim.com

Last summer we spent nine weeks in France and apparently that’s not enough. For much of the fall we didn’t plan any travel, waiting first for Mark to have knee replacement surgery and then to figure out if he was going to do the second in quick succession. Once he decided to defer the second knee – maybe he won’t need it and we were seriously tired of not being able to plan travel – we started splurging on our planning. After a couple quick and short trips to the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota, our first real adventure was off to St. Martin and St. Barts, neighboring islands in the French West Indies.

Our first stop for four nights was St. Martin. The island is a little odd in that since 1648 it’s been split between France and the Netherlands; about 60 percent of the land is French, but 60 percent of the population lives on Dutch side. Stranger still, the French side is part of the EU, while the Dutch side is not. (It turns out Sint Maarten, as it’s known in Dutch, is one of four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, along with the Netherlands, Aruba, and Curaçao. Who knew??) Thus on the Dutch side they primarily use the U.S. dollar while on the French side they use the Euro. Odd.

Oh, and here’s a pretty cool trivia fact if this question ever comes up. Should anyone ask you if France shares a land border with the the Netherlands you will sound brilliant when you point out that they do here on St. Martin.

As usual, our beach vacations are just that: beach vacations. No one comes to these Caribbean islands for culture or adventure beyond maybe scuba diving. And the beach we were on – the Baie Longue, or Long Bay – was spectacular; for my money one of the greatest beaches I’ve ever been on. And the way it is laid out naturally, with a land barrier on one side and undeveloped land on the other it was for all practical purposes a private beach.

As is typical for us about the only thing we have to research and plan once we get here is where to eat. One of the joys of coming to France, of course, is the great food. And for the most part we weren’t disappointed. We had dinner off-resort three times; one was really good, one was quite good, and one was good enough. The really good one was just across the “border” – it’s just an imaginary line, no customs or even need to slow down – into the Dutch side. A lovely little French restaurant in a little beach town that was fun.

The other two nights we went into Grand Case, the biggest town on the French side. A lively beach town that reminded us the kind of place we would have stayed 10 or 15 years ago. Some good food and a surprisingly good beach bar for a pre-dinner martini.

And so after a few perfect days on the beach it was off to St. Barts. We had booked a boat for the 45-minute commute and were really looking forward to it. It took almost as long to drive from our resort

to the port where the boat was going to be but when we got there we learned the boat had been cancelled, some sort of mechanical problem.

Now our experience is that when an airline cancels a flight they work with you to find some alternative transportation. Not so this boat company. Nope, we’re not running. You can go to the French side of the island and see if there is anything at that port but we don’t have any information. Fortunately our taxi driver had hung around to see if we were going to need help and so he started driving us back to France. En route we go online and discovered that we could buy plane tickets for a little after noon, yet another example of the advantages of just being able to buy your way out of a challenging predicament. Now, the airport was at most 15 minutes from our hotel but between the drive to the port, the confusion about what to do there, and then the drive back – including a 20-minute delay while some massive yachts went through a draw bridge – we were almost two hours in the car. Frustrating!

The one redeeming part of the whole fiasco is that the plane ride was pretty cool. There were six of us on this little prop plane and the entire time from boarding to landing was probably no more than 15 minutes, certainly not more than 20. They led us to the plane, we buckled in, the pilot taxied about 10 yards to the runway and off we went for the 10-minute flight to St. Barts. And the best part was the arrival there, where the plane flies pretty low over a hill and then does a steep dive down to the short runway. Definitely cool and given that there are hourly flights between the two islands the pilots do it often enough you can be pretty confident of surviving. Oh, and one last nice thing about the flight. They boarded 30 minutes early like most flights do, but boarding took only seconds. So they took off and we landed 10 or 15 minutes before we were supposed to take off!

Next stop St. Barts.