day four-St. Thomas

  This is the day we finally got to stand on land. We arrived at St. Thomas at around 10am, and disembarked the ship shortly after that. We had booked an excursion for today which would take us by boat from St. Thomas to the island Tortola to swim with the dolphins. I was more than a little excited about this day.

 
  We went outside right after we got to the island, and WOW. It was so humid that as soon as we stepped outside we were wet. It took me so long to get this one photo of us in front of St. Thomas, because my lens kept fogging up. I'd wipe it with a cloth, and within a couple seconds it was completely covered with condensation again. Luckily there was a lady that was willing to take our picture, so I wiped the lens off, and then we took the picture fast before it had time to fog up again. This is one of the many reasons there are only three pictures from this day.

  We disembarked the ship, and since we had about an hour to kill before we were supposed to meet for our awesome dolphin swim excursion, we went and walked through the shops right by the pier. When it was time for us to meet our group, we headed over. By this time, it was pouring rain pretty good, but up to this point it hadn't really been a huge deal since I had happened to pack an umbrella. As soon as we got back over to the ship, however, it started to rain harder and harder and harder till it was in torrential downpour mode, and I was getting pretty worried about keeping my camera dry. I had the umbrella pretty much protecting my camera, but my camera bag was still getting pretty wet. Thus another reason I didn't get it out to take any pictures. It didn't really matter that we were getting wet, cause we were wearing our swimming clothes.

This is a picture of our boat from the front. It was huge.

  As we huddled around with all of the other people standing around waiting for their excursions to start, we started hearing each excursion being cancelled, one at a time. By now not only was it raining by the bucketful, it was also lightning/thundering pretty close to where we were. We guessed that ours would be cancelled too, right about the time they announced that the dolphin swim would be cancelled. And with it, our day in St. Thomas was all but ruined.

  We got back on the ship to unload the stuff we didn't want to get soaked, and changed since we wouldn't be needing our swimming clothes after all. We had till that evening in St. Thomas, so we went and walked around for a while. We had no idea what to do, or where to go, so we just wandered. Kenny's sunburn was making him pretty miserable, so we were kind of looking for somewhere we could buy some stuff to put on it. Pretty soon, we found a K-mart. Score! So we went there, bought the sunburn stuff, and headed back. On the way back we went through some of the little shops and bought a few souvenirs for the kids. Then we got back on board the ship and went to eat because by this time we were exhausted and starving. We ate at the buffet and then hung out for the rest of the day, mostly just wandering around the ship. I kind of wish we had found a taxi or something to take us to see something cool, or to find a beach or something so that our St. Thomas day would have been more fun, but oh well.

  That night they had a "Love and Marriage Game Show" that was really funny. The cruise director, Graham Seymour was really funny, and that was a pretty fun way to end the night.

Here's our little bat friend. If we hadn't needed that bath mat the next morning, we would have kept him around a little longer :)