Another beautiful week in the Caribbean, and  things are heating up! It’s about 85 and sunny most days, with the occasional shower here and there. We don’t run our air conditioning ($$$), so it gets rather warm in the house! It’s funny how acclimated you get to a new temperature, though. When we wake up in the morning and the thermometer reads 79 or 80 it feels glorious. In Iowa it can get above 100 degrees in the summer, with nearly 100% humidity, so we know we won’t have to deal with that! No real storms yet, and we have passed through one month of hurricane season. I was watching the Today Show this morning for the first time in over a month and they said “It’s time to watch the tropics!!!” and showed a map of Florida. So watch out, Mickey, there is a tropical depression headed your way.

On Saturday Dan and I participated in the second annual Cruzan Rum Run, and when they advertised it as “all-terrain”, they weren’t kidding! Started on the beach, ran up super rocky and steep trails, some paved roads, and more hills. The view was lovely, but man I wasn’t prepared for the hills! We had fun though, and we finished. The best part is the free rum at the end! We ate lunch at Latitude 18 and met some new friends.

Beautiful Saturday on the east end.

Winner!

Enjoying Latitude 18 on the east end

After naps in the afternoon we headed to Frenchtown, on the waterfront in Charlotte Amalie and participated in the Frenchtown Pub Crawl. We hit four different bars, and got to experience four very different atmospheres.

Rum Shandy is an open-air cabana bar serving good food and their signature “Rum Shandy” drinks.

Rum Shandy Cabana Bar

Alexander’s Bella Blu is more restaurant than bar, but we enjoyed a drink and had a brie and apple appetizer. I’d lie to go back there to actually eat a meal.

The third bar was Betsy’s Bar, and is a St. Thomas institution. It was a strange crowd in there, and so we just drank our drink and headed to the last stop.

Betsy’s Bar

Twisted Cork is a wine bar and restaurant with a great menu and wine list. We ordered duck fat pomme frites and the mac and cheese appetizer. Whoa. Both were outstanding! We’ll be back for sure.

We collected our pub crawl t-shirts and headed home.

Dan golfed on Sunday and the rest of the day was restful. Our friend M was in a spearfishing tournament in Hull Bay so we met his wife at Hideaway for some food to wait for him to return.

We have cable now. Which is good and bad. Good, because now we have cable and can see some more of our shows, and bad because….we have cable. When you’re paying for a service, you feel like you should use it. We are enjoying the “expanded” cable package right now because it was on special for three months and included free installations, but we’ll get through the summer and see if we need ALL those channels.

Dan gets Thursday and Friday off this week, so we are hoping to head to St. John for their Carnival festivities and to celebrate the 4th of July.

Cheers from St. Thomas!