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Thursday, March 12, 2015

Virgin Island Vaca

Summer is right around the corner!  We can feel it this week and that put me in the mood to brighten up our home.  I've already swapped out all the winter decor with lots of spring-y details.  I'll take some pictures this weekend to share the spring updates (hint: lots of moss and sticks from the yard)!
 
It looks like just about everyone has escaped the artic temps and jetted down south! Justin and I took a few days and visited the Virgin Islands for a little vacation. My brother got married on St. Thomas over the weekend, so we took advantage of our time down there and did some island hopping. 

We visited St. Thomas, St. John, and Virgin Gorda during our stay. Our home base was St. Thomas (since that's where the whole family was staying) but we didn't spend much time on the island other than sleeping. We watched the sun rise over St. John right from our balcony (see below) each morning.  Then we jumped on the ferry to take a 20 min ride over to St. John where we did most of our sightseeing. 
 
These photos were all taken with either my Nikon SLR, GoPro Hero, or the Iphone.  None of them have been retouched... these are all straight out of the camera!  I just added my watermark or some text to them in PS elements.  The views really are this amazing.
 

My favorite part of our trip was watching the sun set over dinner each evening. Our favorite place to perch while watching the sun fade over St. Thomas was a sweet little restaurant called Vista Mare in Cruz Bay (on St. John).


The Pork Belly appetizer was amaze-balls.  And it went perfect with a chilled glass of chardonnay.


We visited four beaches on St. John. Trunk Bay was definitely our favorite...We loved it so much that we spent two days there!


And we finally tested out the new GoPro.

 
And took some cool videos of the coral reefs. Our first time turning on our GoPro was while we were on the beach... talk about planning ahead.  So while we thought we were taking a video, we were actually taking pictures. We finally got the hang of it, but we didn't get any videos of snorkeling at the nicest coral reef we came across.  Oh well, I guess we'll just have to go back. 
 

 
We met a few locals on our trip who led us to a lesser known snorkeling zone. It was a bit of a hike to get to, but we like the less touristy areas.  We swam out 1/3rd of a mile from the coast over to Watermelon Cay and found a beautiful (and very active) coral reef.  The water was a little rough and I wasn't super comfortable with the choppy waves (it kept pulling me towards the Cay where the water was really shallow and the coral was really tall).  Long story short... Justin has a nice battle scar to prove that his wife will pull him down when she freaks out over the shallow reef zone.  Oops.  Sorry hubs.  Turns out coral is actually really sharp.    
 
 
We spent our final day on Virgin Gorda (part of the BVI) to visit The Baths. This is a site where a bunch of giant boulders have formed natural grottos and pools along the coast.  We were warned that it gets pretty crowded...
 

 

Thankfully, this was only the crowd at one of the beaches at the beginning of the hike.  It cleared out once we started crawling through the boulders and we came across some pretty spectacular sights.
 
 

 
We took the ferry back to St. John and enjoyed one final dinner (at ZoZo's) before we left the next day.
 


View of Tortola (BVI) from the ferry



Ruins at Caneel Bay

On another note... have you been to Target lately? That's a silly question. 

I found all of my new bathing suits, hat, and cover ups at Target this year and I was able to snag them all on sale.  Seriously LOVE their sheer kimonos!  I fell in love with a kimono cover-up at a department store but didn't get it because it was $90.  So glad I didn't, too, because Target had about 5 different lightweight, sheer kimono styles for $22 each (I bought 2 - you can find one of them here and I'm wearing the fringe one in a picture above). 



I guess they're not really considered swimsuit cover-ups, but they worked great!

Our little vacation got me so excited for summer.  I'm looking forward to getting my garden started later this week. What are you most excited about this spring?


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