Tuesday
I awoke the next morning to a beautiful sunrise as we pulled into port at St. Thomas. We had an excursion booked, St. John On Your Own. I had booked this one because (a) Trunk Bay was on my list of places to see and (b) I thought it would be fun for LS to get another Junior Ranger badge. However, we were visiting during the government shutdown, which meant the Visitor’s Center to the National Park was closed, which meant no badge. Oh well!
We had ordered breakfast room service the night before, so it arrived and we quickly ate before heading down to our meeting point in the Marvel dining room. We boarded a ferry with our group that took us over to St. John in about 45 minutes. Since we weren’t headed to the Visitor’s Center first, we just got on a taxi truck headed to Trunk Bay.
The excursion was meant to give you about two-ish hours on the island, but I checked with one of the cast members about making our own way back instead of meeting back up with the group, and he said that was fine. He didn’t need to check us off a list or anything, so that was easy peasy.
We set up a spot at Trunk Bay and then enjoyed it for the next four hours. There’s a drink and food stand there, so we got lunch before deciding to head back to the ship.
Our all aboard time was 5:45pm (the excursion left St. John at 11:45am!) so we got a taxi back to the ferry port around 2:00pm. We bought three ferry passes for the 3pm ferry. This ferry takes you to the other side of St. Thomas than we had left on, so it was quicker but then we needed to take a taxi back to the cruise port. All in all, it took about an hour to get back to the ship and cost an extra $60 for the three of us, but I thought that was well worth it to get a few extra hours on the beach. We probably could have stayed another hour and been safe but I didn’t want to risk it.
Once we were back on the Treasure, we showered and donned our pirate best to celebrate Pirate Night. We ate dinner back at Marvel, and then checked out some of the pirate shows on the lido deck.
We had seen a mysterious screen on deck 5 about a ghost hunt that had said coming soon, so we decided to go check and see if it had started yet. It had! We spent the next couple hours hunting and collecting ghosts around the ship. LS had a blast!
