indy
I've been fortunate to visit the island of St. Maarten about 5-6 times with my family. The French/Dutch island quickly became a spring break or summer vacation default destination, and we've mostly stayed in the same hotel on the beach of Grand Case. Days are relaxing and quiet because St. Maarten isn't as popular as some other islands (Bahamas, Martinique or St. Thomas). Some days we've had the entire beach to ourselves. The water is clear enough to easily find the dozens of starfish scattered across the sand underwater.
But enough about this "vacation" stuff. The part Andrew and I love most about visiting the island is exploring places we haven't been to before. Over the course of our half-dozen visits, we've continued to find new places to swim to, climb up, or jump off: Climbing to the top of Mount Scenery in Saba and watching the clouds rush into our faces. Chasing the goats of "Goat Mountain" and naming a particular formation "Whale Rock." Seemingly walking across water to a small island completely covered in seashells. Discovering the underwater cave in Baie Rouge. The Indiana Jones inside the two of us craves this adventure that's missing from daily life, unless you count watching those truck commercials where they show some exotic unreachable mountaintop that only their advertised truck can reach. Yeah, you know the one.
Quite possibly our biggest adventure of all time took place at Mullet Bay about four years ago. St. Maarten has a knack for getting hit with hurricanes as soon as we leave the island (which is my argument for living there permanently). So when we returned to Mullet Bay after a particularly bad hurricane season, a beachside restaurant we had been to in previous years was closed up and severely damaged. Nails stuck out of splintered two-by-fours strewn in the overgrown island grass. A two-story building which sheltered the main dining area, kitchen and restrooms stood next to a former swimming pool that was now caked in a thick, polluted, muddy substance (fun to throw rocks in, though). A two story building with its staircase destroyed only gave us one mission: to get to the second floor.
We tried to think of different ways to get up and finally settled on stacking up the broken wood to grab a telephone cable in order to pull ourselves up (naturally). Andrew was the first to go, and just when he grabbed the cable, the stack of wood below him fell down. It was only about a 7-foot drop, but Andrew was facing falling into a pile of broken wood and nails. He managed to pull himself up and explored the second floor. I never made it up; I was too busy trying to find a way for Andrew to get down. My idea was to take a metal shelf from the kitchen (with an oven that apparently exploded at some point), but Andrew was able to find a clear area to jump into. The we busted open a boarded-shut door and found a flooded basement.
After exploring every inch of the abandoned restaurant we started to walk along the coast of the beach, which eventually changed into some pretty steep rocks. We continued hugging the coast until we saw a strange brick arch built into the rocks towards the shore. Curious, we climbed up to it. Whatever it was, it had been halted mid-construction when the hurricane hit. Andrew and I guessed it was the foundation for a hotel or a house. There were about three stories, but the middle story had a huge gap between the lone concrete stairway and the floor. We both looked down and just saw pitch black. Darkness. Maybe it was only a few feet deep or maybe it led to a collapsed basement, but for the sake of the story let's say it was an 100-yard drop into another dimension. Needless to say, we both jumped over it to reach the middle floor. We weren't sure how stable the floor on the other side was, but we took the leap of faith anyway and made it. How wide it was, I'm not sure, but it required a running jump. The floor itself wasn't that exciting, but it had a pretty nice view of the coast.
The day ended with our walk to seashell island, but that's another story to be told another day. Compared to a difficult day at work or home, it's nice to remember days like these. Time to go celebrate Nick's birthday.
Wednesday, January 8 at 3:11 PM
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