St Lucia with the family – Part 2

This is the little slice of heaven we found in Marigot Bay – Capella Marina.
Even when we weren’t on the boat – this was not the kind of place we vacationed at.
We were more of a 2 star rental and a car kind of traveler because quite frankly the place your visiting is NOT represented by your resort or hotel.
It’s off the dirt roads, in the small towns and for me in the grocery stores.
That’s real life – not the resort.

So we threw the ‘real experience’ out the window when we found this place.
It’s a high end marina (off season right now), $20 for a mooring ball and we get use of the whole place!
That includes this pool, excellent wifi, the gym and staff that treat you like you’re not on a $20 ball.

To put that into perspective for those of you not familiar with mooring balls:
Consider a mooring ball a parking spot for your boat.
Someone owns it so you pay to hook up to it.
In USVI we pay $15 / night in BVI we pay $30.
Included in that cost is …nothing.
So you can see why we’re blown away by this place!

Did I mention the cabanas with pillows and fresh towels?
What about the complimentary water and coconuts they bring around.
Oh ya and there’s the 2pm snack…
Seriously?

The kids really enjoyed the pool – I mean the wifi lol!
To be honest we ALL enjoyed having the wifi but it wasn’t something that ruled our days.
This is our view off the back of the boat.

That little island just sparkled at night.

This one turned out great too!

So many choices on where to nap ugh!

It wasn’t all about relaxing though.
We had many, many intense and controversial games of Scrabble – Team Scrabble actually.

…and Engineer Jenga, Yahtzee, and of course Cards of Humanity where let’s face it, everyone’s a winner!

We went for sunset sails.

Were treated to this:

A must see in St Lucia is the Pitons.

Two very pointy jagged mountains pushed out of the earth through volcanic activity.

Soufriere, is where you go to catch a tour there.

Let’s just say I wouldn’t consider Soufriere one of the ‘tourist friendly’ spots.
We drove through once.
We walked around – that was … uncomfortable.
The last time we paid a guy to watch our dinghy on a supposedly secure dock while we spent money in this town and hired a driver. NICE.
Here you guy strange guy, take this $ and thanks for not stealing or damaging our dinghy {insert swear word}.

I’m not saying roll out the red carpet but people, tourism is your main resource.
At the very least please don’t make the people trying to spend money I your community feel like they wish they stayed at the resort or on the boat!
Cuba is going to clear the playing field once she’s up and running.

So off we went on a tour:

Our driver was cool.
First we went to the volcano.

It was hot to begin with.
Now it was hotter and it smelled like sulphur which was not going over well with girls.
STRONG sulphur smell.
The guide kept saying ‘breathe it in, it’s good for the insides!’
We all nodded politely and continued breathing through our shirts!

Here is pure spring water falling from a spring above it and another before that.
The guide was encouraging us to fill our water bottles up!
This was going to be good!

And BOILING hot!
Not what you want in your water bottle on a hot day standing on a volcano!

This is a cashew tree.

Did you know… that an apple like fruit grows on this tree, roughly same size and very similar looking.
Like this:

Long story short that’s the cashew at the bottom.
This gave us a whole new perspective on cashews and why they’re so expensive.
You can eat the fruit part – it’s like a firm, tart apple.

With that we were off to the mud baths.
A magical place that takes 20 years off your age after you cake yourself in volcanic mud and rinse off in the sulphur springs which is like a hot hot muddy bath that smells like egg farts.

We were positive that no one was going to go in.
We were wrong.

We rinsed off in a beautiful waterfall and yes continued to smell like…gross but our skin was soft like baby bum!
Nature’s spa – wonderful!

It seemed fitting we take 20 yrs off our years that day cause it was Captain’s Birthday – the big 50!!

We had the designated driver set up.

We had bought a 6lb tuna off a fisherman and brought it to the Rain Forest Restaurant to cook up for us.

They did sashimi, tartare and pan fried. Everything was deelish as you can see!

We’ve learned that time with the kids away from distractions, friends, party’s etc. is priceless.
These moments are precious and hard to come by with everyone’s busy lives let alone the distance.