St. Maarten

I can't quite figure out the name of St. Maarten – it's spelled numerous ways on signs – St. Martin / St. Maarten / St. Marten / etc. I can't Wikipedia it right now so maybe I'll read this later and remember to look it up or better yet – one of you reading this post on my FB wall what's up with the name.

We were at port at 9am and we didn't have to be at our scuba diving adventure until 2pm so we headed out to Marigot. Marigot was likely the wrong choice but we had a decent time anyways. We walked around the shops and climbed up to Fort Marigot at the top of this huge hill that had a great view. Before we made our way back to the port to meet for our excursion we stopped off to order lunch. About 25 minutes after we ordered the waitress stopped by to say it'd be right out. She came back about 5 minutes later and said they had lost our order and she needed it again. She also said the drinks were comped. We waited again for what seemed like forever until it got to the point where I told her we couldn't wait any longer and were leaving. At that exact moment she went back to the kitchen and our Mahi burger was ready. We quickly ate it and headed out. The Mahi was delicious and cooked to perfection – not sure it was worth the wait though.

We took a taxi back to port and it was about a 20 minute windy ride and met the lady that was going to lead us to the dive shop for our Discover Scuba Diving excursion. She was from South Africa and we talked a little bit about that. The dive shop told us that this could be used as 1 of the 4 mandatory dives required to become scuba certified. We had a short introductory course where the basics were explained and there was actually a short test at the end that everyone passed except one guy. There were 6 of us – family of 3 – single – the 2 of us. The other 4 went down with one instructor and we went down with another. We started off with some basic skills – taking your regulator out of your mouth and putting it back in under water. Then the next one was if you lost the regulator and had to find it before putting it back in your mouth. The third was being able to clear water from your goggles. Lora and I both passed and we headed down 25-30 feet to the ocean floor. Every few feet you had to keep popping your ears and eventually we made it to the bottom. It was a great mixture of being scared something could go wrong and unbelievably amazing. We made our way a few feet from the ocean floor to a submarine that had been sunk there for us to explore. It was great – my favorite part was jus swimming forward and watching the material in the ocean just come at me – it was almost surreal to the point that it reminded me of a 3-D IMAX. We swam around a bit more and eventually made our way to the boat. We were under water for about 30 minutes. We found out that 2 people in the other group didn't make it down – the single had a killer 'stache and it was letting water in the mask – the boy in the family couldn't pop his ears and it was too painful for him.

We boarded the ship and were lazy until dinner time – tonight was Qsine. The ship had a few specialty restaurants that you had to make reservations for and they had a 'cover charge.' We booked Qsine our first day and were pretty excited about it. It was a tapas style restaurant with an iPad as the menu. They recommended we pick out 6-8 items and we narrowed it down to 8 – we soon found this to be a huge mistake. We ordered the following: sushi / spring rolls / filet mignon / lava crab / sliders / meatballs / treseviche / tacos – we ended up canceling the tacos after the 5^th dish. The amount of food was beyond filling. Everything was served in a unique way – such as the sushi that were served as lollipops on sticks. After the barrage of amazing food we then ordered dessert and it was no slouch either. We got this weird ice cream dish and a cheesecake tini. The cheesecake was served in a stemless martini glass on top of a bowl. The bowl was filled with cotton candy. They also came around with chocolate covered strawberries that had a few different dipping sauces. After we couldn't bother to move the utensils anymore we made our way to this lowly lit lounge that had a guitar player playing some Sinatra and other music in that genre. It was relaxing and I had a glass of champagne. After that we made our way up to the deck to potentially check out the stars – which was a big bust. Instead we stumbled onto a party happening up next to the pool.

We stayed for a bit before eventually heading back to our room. We stopped off at the casino and lost $20 in about 20 minutes just before heading to sleep and should have just gone straight there.