Y-O, Day 6
Finally made it to St. Martin, the Gold Island. Now the hardcore rocking and shimmying can stop, and the hardcore shopping can begin.
The ship pulled into St. Martin at somewhere around 5am. Apparently I never noticed the night before. Sue me, I was busy at the time.
Got woken up again around 9:30am or so by the massive fists of Kevin again. I really think he enjoys that job. This time I didn’t fall over myself getting out of bed, because I knew what it was. Instead I unhooked the ladder and dropped it on Zach, and told him to get the door and make Kevin stop. Sometimes I can be cranky in the morning.
Everyone was roused awake, except for Mini-Moosifer. She’d been up for an hour planning her day out. Moosifer had made the command that at noon we were going to the beach, and Mini-Moosifer latched onto that idea. There were no really good excursions, so we were just heading to the beach ourselves.
We got off the boat, right onto a dock. A little ways in front of us were all the regular cabbies, and then past that were the sea taxis. For $5/day, you can get unlimited rides across town, on a boat. The walk to the shopping area is a good 15 minutes, so the 5 minute sea taxi ride was cool with us. We all piled in and headed to the shopping district.
Since St Martin is the gold island, Train wanted to get a new chain. He knew a price that he wanted to pay, around $8-9 per gram, how big of a chain, and what style. He was equipped with everything, except Barry’s natural jew instinct. So me, Train and Barry all went gold shopping.
There were at least a dozen jewelry stores within a half mile on the strip. Plenty of combo stores too. The problem with shopping was that the price of gold has gone up a lot, to where the dealers were trying to charge $14-15/gram. That’s a big difference when you’re talking about 60 grams of gold. But those bastards didn’t buy the chains they’re selling at $15, they bought them a year ago when gold was at $9. Screw that.
Eventually we found a nice combo store, jewelry and booze, and an Indian guy who was willing to bargain. I think he eventually got down to about $10/gram for Train’s chain. The starting price was somewhere around $1100, but in the end he got it for $675. Not bad. Barry bought Lucille a bracelet too, and Merri bought some earrings, so the guy lowered his prices some more. Barry also bought 2 bottles of Johnny Walker Blue for $80 each, and the guy behind the counter got excited and started breaking out the Heinekens and pineapple rum and cokes. They really know how to treat shoppers there. Get ‘em drunk and hit ‘em hard.
Zach had picked up a ring at a different store, tanzanite, for his girlfriend at home. We called it his Guilt Ring, since he basically had a new girlfriend while on the cruise. Funny, but true. He is the snugglemaster. Just the day before, he left our room saying, “I’m going to take a nap.” When we asked why he was leaving to take a nap, he said, “Oh, I’m gonna go lay down and take a nap with her.” Sigh. You idiot. So he got a new girlfriend for the trip, and his old girlfriend gets a tanzanite ring. OK, terrific.
By this point it was around 11:30, and Moosifer said we had to hurry back to the ship, drop off our stuff and get to the beach. We high-tailed it to the taxis and back to the ship, and got rid of our stuff. Matt brought on a 24 pack of Heineken, and when the customs lady on the ship stopped him, he told her “No fucking way. They said liquor, not beer. I’m drinking these in my room now.” Then he walked right past her. I love it. We even disregard international laws.
Everyone then realized they were hungry. Eventually, Moosifer gave in, and said 1pm to meet by the cabbies for the trip to the beach on the French side of the island. We couldn’t believe it, Moosifer gave in.
But Mini-Moosifer didn’t. She had 12noon set in her schedule, so she left. She took Jeremy and went to the beach. We couldn’t believe that either, that the pupil surpassed the master. Moosifer has passed on her crown. There are some great pictures of the two of them from later on in the day, I’ll post them afterwards.
Eventually we all got to the cab stand by 1pm, and jumped on to Orient Beach, the nicer beach on the French side of the island (the port is on the Dutch side). It’s also the beach with a nude beach attached, so we all wanted to go see that too. Or so we thought.
We pulled in, grabbed some chairs on the beach and headed into the water. We started swimming towards the floating trampolines, but apparently they were all broken. Shame, I heard they were really fun. So we stayed in the waves by the trampolines, which were intense. 4-5 foot swells, in already 5 foot deep water. We were getting drowned and pounded every minute, it was great.
After a while, I had so much salt water crammed in my nose and mouth that I had to give up and head back to shore for a while. I really couldn’t breathe, it burned so much. On the way back up the beach, I saw the obligatory old woman in only a thong, her giant wrinkled boobs getting kicked back and forth between her feet like soccer balls. Shame.
Then of course, I saw Jamie and Heather. They were on lounges right by the beach with their mothers, relaxing. Heather was enjoying the sun, Jamie was slightly burnt so she was wrapped up in blankets. I accused them of following us yet again, and to get off our nuts. Their mothers laughed. I like them. They said they saw us out in the water, but they didn’t know it was us, and they kept laughing at how much we were getting tossed around. Funny girls, really. We told them to meet us out later on, as we had some good drinking to do that night.
Few minutes later, everyone went back into the water further east of the trampoline, and the water was better. The waves were decent enough that Lucille came in, and Mini Moosifer too. We jumped around for a while, until Train caught a bad wave and his ass flew right into Lucille. And that’s a Lane ass, those things are gigantic. I think he cut her face a little. Sorry Lulu.
We finally gave up on the water and headed back to the chairs. Looked out over the ocean and saw an intensely bright rainbow, so much so that I had to take pictures. I’ll put them up later too. Never seen one that bright before. And we found out why it was so bright a minute later when it started to downpour instantly. Flash rains. Great.
2 minutes later, the rain was gone, sun was back out. Bizarre.
Then Mini-Moosifer decided she wanted her hair braided. But it was 4pm. And her schedule said we had to leave at 4:30pm. So she enlisted 3 women to do it for her, instead of the normal 1. Go figure. Those 3 ladies worked their asses off, and had her mostly done in like 15 minutes. Then Moosifer had to inspect her hair, to make sure they were doing it right. It was pretty funny, them watching over each other. 4:25pm everything is done and we’re back on the cabs for the ride home.
The ride home takes us past one of the better features of St. Martin’s French side, the whore house. According to the tour guide, for $50 you get an oil change, and for $75 you get a total overhaul. His words, not ours. Nice guy, and the girls were amazing. Well worth the money, dammit.
Got back to the boat, hung around for a while, and ordered more room service. We must have ordered at least 50 cheese pizzas between all of us, over the course of a few days. Insane. Then we decided to order the dinner from downstairs, to our rooms, because we didn’t want to go down tonight. Fine by me, we ate steak on Jesse’s bed. It was great.
Then, after room service, we all had to get dressed up a little bit. It was Big Tom’s birthday, so we all went down to where they were eating dinner and wished him happy birthday, and sang to him when they brought his slice of cake out. Cheers Tom.
After that, me and Matt went to the picture gallery, where they had all the pictures they took during the cruise. Matt had called about the pirate pictures, because they lost our entire table’s roll of film. They eventually found it, and showed the whole roll to Matt so he could pick out our pictures. He took ours, and left. Didn’t pay or anything, just walked out. It was great. Got like 20 pictures for free. I picked up one of the 6 of us guys, all wearing suits and our volleyball medals, from Thursday night. It’s hot. I’ll have to scan it. Also from Matt’s stolen pile I found my pirate picture, when the chick held a plastic knife to my throat, and the picture of me and Zach hugging because we didn’t have dates from the first night of the cruise. We rock.
Then it was time for Big Tom’s surprise party. His third one. We had it up on deck 14, in Cloud Nine, a little lounge. Open bar, but Moosifer had to pay for it all since our travel agent Nikki sucks. She hosed a lot of stuff on the cruise, and this was the big one. She hosed the party, 2 free rooms, airline miles for everyone, a $50 credit for me. A lot of stuff. Bitch. She still hasn’t fixed my credit, I just checked my credit card statement online. She’s getting yet ANOTHER call. Incompetence is something I can’t tolerate.
Back to Big Tom’s party. I think he was getting a little tired of them. He came in and he was surprised for a minute, but then he got annoyed. “Ok, Ok, enough already. I know I’m old. Enough with the parties.” I love that guy. We all hung around, drinking and having a good time. Jesse got on the piano and serenaded Tom with “Wind beneath my wings,” and sang “Jack and Diane” for Jack and Diane (Doreen). It was great. Oh and his encore was “Me and You, You and Me,” also sung to Big Tom. I think there’s a picture of Lulu sprawled out on the piano too. Hot stuff.
After the party was over, we headed to the bar right outside. The Englands had plenty to drink inside, and now they were all ripped. Kevin’s wife was dancing and having a great time. She starts to drag him onto the dance floor, he looks at me and says “She’s fun now, but she’ll be a right bitch come morning.” I love the Englands.
We finally head down to Jesters at around 1:30am or so, chill for a while. Grab some booths, get some buckets, dance a bit. Not a bad time. Jamie and Heather were there from earlier, so they came and chilled with us for a bit. It was a relaxed night since we were all beat from the waves at the beach all day. Still fun though.
End of the night, we get some more beers at last call and head up to the hottubs. Once again, I feel a little tickle underneath the bubbles. Then I realize Heather is on the other side of the pool, and Jamie is sitting next to me. Apparently, good news does travel fast. We enjoy the hottub for a while, then she says she wants to go downstairs. Grabs me by the hand, and we head out, telling Heather to meet us downstairs in a little while.
Let me tell you this, Jersey girls do know what they’re doing. This girl could have outdone Dizzy Gillespie. And it’s always a boost to the old pride hearing that “Woah.”
Passed out after that, so I don’t know when Heather got home. Do know that I woke up around 6:30am again, had another quick round of fun, grabbed my clothes and headed back to my room and bed. Those beds are really, really tiny. Smaller-than-dorm-beds tiny.
St. Thomas is our last stop (we were actually already there), so we had to make sure to live it up to the most. That’s coming tomorrow.
The ship pulled into St. Martin at somewhere around 5am. Apparently I never noticed the night before. Sue me, I was busy at the time.
Got woken up again around 9:30am or so by the massive fists of Kevin again. I really think he enjoys that job. This time I didn’t fall over myself getting out of bed, because I knew what it was. Instead I unhooked the ladder and dropped it on Zach, and told him to get the door and make Kevin stop. Sometimes I can be cranky in the morning.
Everyone was roused awake, except for Mini-Moosifer. She’d been up for an hour planning her day out. Moosifer had made the command that at noon we were going to the beach, and Mini-Moosifer latched onto that idea. There were no really good excursions, so we were just heading to the beach ourselves.
We got off the boat, right onto a dock. A little ways in front of us were all the regular cabbies, and then past that were the sea taxis. For $5/day, you can get unlimited rides across town, on a boat. The walk to the shopping area is a good 15 minutes, so the 5 minute sea taxi ride was cool with us. We all piled in and headed to the shopping district.
Since St Martin is the gold island, Train wanted to get a new chain. He knew a price that he wanted to pay, around $8-9 per gram, how big of a chain, and what style. He was equipped with everything, except Barry’s natural jew instinct. So me, Train and Barry all went gold shopping.
There were at least a dozen jewelry stores within a half mile on the strip. Plenty of combo stores too. The problem with shopping was that the price of gold has gone up a lot, to where the dealers were trying to charge $14-15/gram. That’s a big difference when you’re talking about 60 grams of gold. But those bastards didn’t buy the chains they’re selling at $15, they bought them a year ago when gold was at $9. Screw that.
Eventually we found a nice combo store, jewelry and booze, and an Indian guy who was willing to bargain. I think he eventually got down to about $10/gram for Train’s chain. The starting price was somewhere around $1100, but in the end he got it for $675. Not bad. Barry bought Lucille a bracelet too, and Merri bought some earrings, so the guy lowered his prices some more. Barry also bought 2 bottles of Johnny Walker Blue for $80 each, and the guy behind the counter got excited and started breaking out the Heinekens and pineapple rum and cokes. They really know how to treat shoppers there. Get ‘em drunk and hit ‘em hard.
Zach had picked up a ring at a different store, tanzanite, for his girlfriend at home. We called it his Guilt Ring, since he basically had a new girlfriend while on the cruise. Funny, but true. He is the snugglemaster. Just the day before, he left our room saying, “I’m going to take a nap.” When we asked why he was leaving to take a nap, he said, “Oh, I’m gonna go lay down and take a nap with her.” Sigh. You idiot. So he got a new girlfriend for the trip, and his old girlfriend gets a tanzanite ring. OK, terrific.
By this point it was around 11:30, and Moosifer said we had to hurry back to the ship, drop off our stuff and get to the beach. We high-tailed it to the taxis and back to the ship, and got rid of our stuff. Matt brought on a 24 pack of Heineken, and when the customs lady on the ship stopped him, he told her “No fucking way. They said liquor, not beer. I’m drinking these in my room now.” Then he walked right past her. I love it. We even disregard international laws.
Everyone then realized they were hungry. Eventually, Moosifer gave in, and said 1pm to meet by the cabbies for the trip to the beach on the French side of the island. We couldn’t believe it, Moosifer gave in.
But Mini-Moosifer didn’t. She had 12noon set in her schedule, so she left. She took Jeremy and went to the beach. We couldn’t believe that either, that the pupil surpassed the master. Moosifer has passed on her crown. There are some great pictures of the two of them from later on in the day, I’ll post them afterwards.
Eventually we all got to the cab stand by 1pm, and jumped on to Orient Beach, the nicer beach on the French side of the island (the port is on the Dutch side). It’s also the beach with a nude beach attached, so we all wanted to go see that too. Or so we thought.
We pulled in, grabbed some chairs on the beach and headed into the water. We started swimming towards the floating trampolines, but apparently they were all broken. Shame, I heard they were really fun. So we stayed in the waves by the trampolines, which were intense. 4-5 foot swells, in already 5 foot deep water. We were getting drowned and pounded every minute, it was great.
After a while, I had so much salt water crammed in my nose and mouth that I had to give up and head back to shore for a while. I really couldn’t breathe, it burned so much. On the way back up the beach, I saw the obligatory old woman in only a thong, her giant wrinkled boobs getting kicked back and forth between her feet like soccer balls. Shame.
Then of course, I saw Jamie and Heather. They were on lounges right by the beach with their mothers, relaxing. Heather was enjoying the sun, Jamie was slightly burnt so she was wrapped up in blankets. I accused them of following us yet again, and to get off our nuts. Their mothers laughed. I like them. They said they saw us out in the water, but they didn’t know it was us, and they kept laughing at how much we were getting tossed around. Funny girls, really. We told them to meet us out later on, as we had some good drinking to do that night.
Few minutes later, everyone went back into the water further east of the trampoline, and the water was better. The waves were decent enough that Lucille came in, and Mini Moosifer too. We jumped around for a while, until Train caught a bad wave and his ass flew right into Lucille. And that’s a Lane ass, those things are gigantic. I think he cut her face a little. Sorry Lulu.
We finally gave up on the water and headed back to the chairs. Looked out over the ocean and saw an intensely bright rainbow, so much so that I had to take pictures. I’ll put them up later too. Never seen one that bright before. And we found out why it was so bright a minute later when it started to downpour instantly. Flash rains. Great.
2 minutes later, the rain was gone, sun was back out. Bizarre.
Then Mini-Moosifer decided she wanted her hair braided. But it was 4pm. And her schedule said we had to leave at 4:30pm. So she enlisted 3 women to do it for her, instead of the normal 1. Go figure. Those 3 ladies worked their asses off, and had her mostly done in like 15 minutes. Then Moosifer had to inspect her hair, to make sure they were doing it right. It was pretty funny, them watching over each other. 4:25pm everything is done and we’re back on the cabs for the ride home.
The ride home takes us past one of the better features of St. Martin’s French side, the whore house. According to the tour guide, for $50 you get an oil change, and for $75 you get a total overhaul. His words, not ours. Nice guy, and the girls were amazing. Well worth the money, dammit.
Got back to the boat, hung around for a while, and ordered more room service. We must have ordered at least 50 cheese pizzas between all of us, over the course of a few days. Insane. Then we decided to order the dinner from downstairs, to our rooms, because we didn’t want to go down tonight. Fine by me, we ate steak on Jesse’s bed. It was great.
Then, after room service, we all had to get dressed up a little bit. It was Big Tom’s birthday, so we all went down to where they were eating dinner and wished him happy birthday, and sang to him when they brought his slice of cake out. Cheers Tom.
After that, me and Matt went to the picture gallery, where they had all the pictures they took during the cruise. Matt had called about the pirate pictures, because they lost our entire table’s roll of film. They eventually found it, and showed the whole roll to Matt so he could pick out our pictures. He took ours, and left. Didn’t pay or anything, just walked out. It was great. Got like 20 pictures for free. I picked up one of the 6 of us guys, all wearing suits and our volleyball medals, from Thursday night. It’s hot. I’ll have to scan it. Also from Matt’s stolen pile I found my pirate picture, when the chick held a plastic knife to my throat, and the picture of me and Zach hugging because we didn’t have dates from the first night of the cruise. We rock.
Then it was time for Big Tom’s surprise party. His third one. We had it up on deck 14, in Cloud Nine, a little lounge. Open bar, but Moosifer had to pay for it all since our travel agent Nikki sucks. She hosed a lot of stuff on the cruise, and this was the big one. She hosed the party, 2 free rooms, airline miles for everyone, a $50 credit for me. A lot of stuff. Bitch. She still hasn’t fixed my credit, I just checked my credit card statement online. She’s getting yet ANOTHER call. Incompetence is something I can’t tolerate.
Back to Big Tom’s party. I think he was getting a little tired of them. He came in and he was surprised for a minute, but then he got annoyed. “Ok, Ok, enough already. I know I’m old. Enough with the parties.” I love that guy. We all hung around, drinking and having a good time. Jesse got on the piano and serenaded Tom with “Wind beneath my wings,” and sang “Jack and Diane” for Jack and Diane (Doreen). It was great. Oh and his encore was “Me and You, You and Me,” also sung to Big Tom. I think there’s a picture of Lulu sprawled out on the piano too. Hot stuff.
After the party was over, we headed to the bar right outside. The Englands had plenty to drink inside, and now they were all ripped. Kevin’s wife was dancing and having a great time. She starts to drag him onto the dance floor, he looks at me and says “She’s fun now, but she’ll be a right bitch come morning.” I love the Englands.
We finally head down to Jesters at around 1:30am or so, chill for a while. Grab some booths, get some buckets, dance a bit. Not a bad time. Jamie and Heather were there from earlier, so they came and chilled with us for a bit. It was a relaxed night since we were all beat from the waves at the beach all day. Still fun though.
End of the night, we get some more beers at last call and head up to the hottubs. Once again, I feel a little tickle underneath the bubbles. Then I realize Heather is on the other side of the pool, and Jamie is sitting next to me. Apparently, good news does travel fast. We enjoy the hottub for a while, then she says she wants to go downstairs. Grabs me by the hand, and we head out, telling Heather to meet us downstairs in a little while.
Let me tell you this, Jersey girls do know what they’re doing. This girl could have outdone Dizzy Gillespie. And it’s always a boost to the old pride hearing that “Woah.”
Passed out after that, so I don’t know when Heather got home. Do know that I woke up around 6:30am again, had another quick round of fun, grabbed my clothes and headed back to my room and bed. Those beds are really, really tiny. Smaller-than-dorm-beds tiny.
St. Thomas is our last stop (we were actually already there), so we had to make sure to live it up to the most. That’s coming tomorrow.