Where have we been?

Hope it has not been too long since last I wrote here.  A month has limed away in the island paradise of St. John.  Leaving the van and Julie’s family to fly down to the U.S. Virgin Islands has set us up for a nice time, often spent on beautiful aqua beaches.  We have enjoyed a peaceful vacation.  “A vacation from what”, I hear you asking.  

Ah yes, it is the case that we left sunny Slidell, La, and the dogs life of lounging around on the couch, playing a little golf and generally doing nothing.  Nothing, turns out, is a fairly challenging thing to accomplish in any given day.  We practiced until we became more proficient and we tried not to get down on ourselves when we accomplished doing to any great degree.  We give thanks to Jen Matranga for the comfort of her house and her putting up with our idleness.  Jen gives us a royally good set up when we visit and we tried our best to live like king and queen. The vacation life of the holiday season is a great time to catch up with family and friends, old and new.   Visiting with all of Julie’s school mates for different activities from dinner and a drink, to a loud bar and many drinks, or bike ride and volley ball, to fire and the beach was a ton of fun.  Holiday festivities at the Matranga household were a blast too.  We ate too much candy which we helped Kathy, Julie’s mom, make and watched a lot of good college football after excellent home cooked meals by Vince Matranga.  Really the two weeks plus we shared with a host of good people in the greater New Orleans area warmed our hearts and helped our newly freed lives to slow down and release the chatter of the mind which follows the radical changes of any life in the physical.  

Writing all this about our experience two months ago proves a loss of words.  I know there are more stories to share with you that make for good telling and reading but they don’t carry the same gravity for me at this end of the screen.  I would love to put down the tales of our nights in the French Quarter and New Orleans or the epic cook out in Gulfport but at the same time I would rather fast forward to the present.  Maybe if I get tons of fan mail requesting old news I can dig some up.  For now, onward!

St. Maarten is at the spot on the globe where the Caribbean chain begins to dip to the south and the Windward Islands begin.  We are staying on the Dutch side with my parents in their apartment for the week.  This dry rock in the ocean is much different than the preserved liberal outpost of america; St. John.  We can go to two different countries in the same day without flashing our passports and they are different.  France, as it is affectionately known here, has the cultural flare of Europe while offering beautiful caribbean charm.  The cities of both sides offer great dinning and fashion from Paris.  Mostly I notice that the integration of people happens more freely and readily here than in the USVI.  I really don’t have specifics for this but I can feel that the vacationers, locals, migrants and tourists all share the island as if they claim some right to be here.  It may have to do with the fact that at least on the Dutch side freedom is the name of the game as far as laws and rules go.   

    One new experience we’ve had here is zip-lining.  Our first day here we stopped for a hike at Loterie Farms; an eco preserve in France.  To get to the hiking trails you walk through their fabulous restaurant and treetop bar.  Everything is lush and vibrant as you enter the eco-park cabana.  Above you in the trees are steel cables going every which way with shrieks of happy tourists.  The zip-line course is quite extensive and offers two different routes.  My mom had plans for julie and I to participate but that day we did not have the proper foot ware for safely navigating the cable bridges and other fun treetop obstacles.  We opted for a hike only but made plans immediately to return the next day for the “extreme course.”  Our hike was wonderful.  We started up a trickling gut with huge old mango trees, royal palms and the zip cables strung up all around us.  Soon the ropes course ended and only the pristine forest remained.  (I say pristine because St. Martin/St. Maarten is highly developed and deforested by animal grazing from people actually living off the land.  But even this small patch of preserved forest does not quite feel like the healthy peace of St. John’s forests.)  As we were winding our way up the hillside we hear again the shrieks of jubilation from the trees.  When we look up is there a band of monkeys swing through the jungle? 

 No, it’s a team of extreme recreationalists zipping back and forth across the valley.  They start at the mountain top and work there way down to the entrance station and bar.  We watched a couple and guide clip in and zip along an 800’ cable to the hillside opposite us.  Very exciting: and now fast forward to the next day Julie, a small group of tourists, our guide and I are climbing between trees and laughing as we zip to and from giant trees for almost two hours.  A very fun thing to do.  After our treetop adventure it was off to Phillipsburg on the Dutch side for lunch of fresh conch salad and lightly sauteed calamari.  (Julie enjoyed a rare bacon cheese burger. Yum.)  

We are headed back to the States in two days for the big party in New Orleans.  See some of you all very soon with some of the stories from our month on St. John, USVI.  Love zach.