Sunday, July 11, 2010

St. Maarten: Orient Beach & Pineapple Pete's

The statue in the Merigot Marketplace. I love this side of the island, the French Side. It looks more like a secluded island than one that has a lot of industry like the Dutch Side.The plan was to go shopping at the marketplace but it was closed for the low season. DUH! I knew that, but since I haven't been on the island for a while I forgot. So the shopping had to be put off for a while. I did, however, get to eat at a little French cafe and get a delectable sandwich and dessert. YUMMY! I have been craving that for about 2 years.

See, this is the French Side. Very pretty and lush.
Orient Beach. This beach was never my favorite, but they say in the Caribbean that it is the "most famous". I think it is ok, but everyone else wanted to see it, so we went. The interesting thing about this beach is that they have a naked side to the beach. Of course all of the beaches are topless and occasionally you will see a random tourist go naked at one of those beaches, which is a shocker in itself, but here at Orient it it's common. Vaughn and I walked over to the naked side of the beach and dared each other to "bare it all." YEAH, we chicken out! HA HA HA
Here we are sporting our beach bods. We worked very, very hard to get this way. Back in Feb-March, Vaughn and I decided that if we were going to go back to St. Maarten we had to do some serious work on ourselves. So we started the Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred video and continued to work out with it right up until we left on this vacation. The work paid off. It is nice to be able to fit into things that I haven't been able to fit into for years.
During our time at Orient Beach, we decided to splurge and go Parasailing. I have never been and have always wanted to try it out. We found out we could go as a couple, so we bought the tickets and away we went.This is us preparing to get on the jet skis and head out to the boat that would take us up, up and away. I was so excited I could have jumped around like a little kid.
Lift off...........by the look on my face one could deduce that I am a tiny bit scared, but I was just excited to get up and into the air.
And up into the air we went. We got up so high that we could see a whole big part of the French Side. You could even see the bigger fish, possibly sharks???, in the water below us. YIKES!! I could have stayed up there for longer than the 15 minutes they gave us. What a rush!
The decent!Coming in for a landing. The rest of our crew also experienced the rush of sailing in the air. What a memory. I love doing things like this on vacation because it is an experience of a lifetime.
One last picture of the beach. Even though I don't love Orient Beach, it is still a Caribbean beach and they are all gorgeous in my opinion.
We all got a little too much sun and some of us were a bit crispier than others. Even so, we decided that it was time to eat out for a night. We slathered ourselves with Aloe Vera, cleaned up and headed to Pineapple Pete's for dinner.
Me and my honey. Dinner was delightful as it always is at Pineapple Pete's. I had the Mahi Mahi and I could have eaten another full plate of it, just to savor the taste, but I didn't want to have a stomach ache for the next three days.
Yeah, Mark got a bit more burned than the rest of us. He needed to "reapply" the sunscreen a little more than he did. But he was a good sport and had fun with us that night.
Kyle and Jessica, Mark and Jen's friends from Las Vegas, also enjoying dinner.
After dinner, the rest of the crew went back to the resort while Vaughn and I headed to the Red Piano Bar to hang out with Janelle and Trey. We ran into them at the beach and hung out there, and then decided we needed to hang out more in the evening. It was a wonderful time to catch up and reminisce about old times. A perfect evening.

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