Two dollar taxi bus

Securite, securite, securite, barked the VHF radio, Charlotte Amalie Harbor will be closed to traffic Saturday evening due to carnival fireworks…Fireworks! I love fireworks. For years in Pittsburgh I shoehorned Mischievous into the Allegheny River with a thousand other boats or floating objects, cheek to jowl, to watch Fourth of July fireworks. Kind of a chancy proposition with too many overly lubricated skippers with too many boats, but also too beautiful to miss.

There was no way we were going to pass on carnival fireworks in St. Thomas but jamming Escape Velocity into a strange harbor filled to the eyeballs with yachts wasn’t making me feel warm and fuzzy so we took a ferry over from St John.

No…I really can’t say that I recognize anything but the vibe, but then carnival is just crazy, crazy crowds, crazy costumes, wild music.

We zig zagged through the old town which has uptown shops carved into very old stone Danish warehouses with arched doors and windows.

After having our senses bombarded for a few hours we were looking for some food at a quiet outdoor corner cafe and maybe some painkillers! We found just the spot overlooking the harbor with good painkillers, nice combination.

We had a few hours to kill so we walked through the music and food venue and I had to try this concoction which consists of fried potato hash in the shape of a bowl, jerk pork, onion, lettuce, and tomato on top. Mighty fine.

We took up position on the quay along the harbor and struck up a conversation with Sinclair who was born in Tortola, grew up in St. Thomas, works in New Jersey and has family up and down the Eastern seaboard. Talking with him made the time pass easily.

The fireworks were great and we saw some new types we hadn’t seen before, I’d say more of the sky painting, thoughtful variety as opposed to Pittsburgh style where subtlety doesn’t impress…more like a forty-five minute continuous grand finale. Subtle it ain’t, but lots of fun.

One last adventure awaited us because the last ferry leaves from Redhook Bay not Charlotte Amalie, which means we’d need to get a ride on the two dollar taxi bus. Maybe it was because, for us, anything over six mph is dicing with death or the driver was just a madwoman but the trip hurtling over the mountain in the two dollar doorless taxi bus will not be forgotten soon.

Back in St John the north wind had piled-up enough water in Cruz Bay that the dinghy dock was all but under water and apparently it had rained quite a bit, because the dink had a lot of water in it. Where are you going to get plastic bags for your feet in St John at midnight? We got a little wet but we got back home, tired and happy.