I have never been to St. Marteen, furthermore, the only thing I knew I wanted to do was check out Airport Beach. We got into Philipsburg at 8am and disembarked the ship at 8:30a. Acting like a typical tourist, I had no clue what to do. We made our way to a cab and found a shared taxi to Airport Beach (Mahlo Beach) for $8 per person.
You may be asking yourself what Airport Beach is. It’s a beach on the Dutch side of St. Marteen where the airplanes land right over you at the beach. Airport Beach is probably one of the most dangerous beaches in the world if you’re not safe, but you’ve got to be a complete moron or oblivious to your surroundings to actually get hurt (or blown away) by the jet blast.
The ride to the beach was 20-30 minutes and they let us out at the Sunset Bar. You can tell that only tourists go there but the beer cheap and cold. They have a surfboard where the write the airplane arrivals in each day. We couldn’t have asked for a better day to be at the beach. It was a post card day that you’d see on a St. Marteen commercial.
The first couple of planes were small. Like private jet small. Afterwards the bigger planes started coming in, a Jet Blue fight, an American Airlines flight and the Dutch airline jumbo 747 airline KLM came in. That was the money shot. You would never believe that a plane could fly so low when landing at the beach but it did and was awesome. The photo looks photo shopped but I can assure you it was real. After spending a couple hours on the beach we left and headed back to the ship. We decided not to do a shared taxi on the way back and just hailed one, it was $20 total for two of us to head back to the ship.
The cruise ship terminal was filled with shops and bars, as well as one internet café that had rather expensive internet prices, $10 per hour.
Because we came in late this morning because of a medical emergency last night, we stayed until 6pm. The sail away was nice. There were two ships at the pier with us, Norwegian Epic and Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas. We were the first to leave.
Back on the ship we had dinner in the main dining room, again, no complaints. Everything in the main dining room seems to be up to par. I had bbq salmon and a fried pork chop (again with two meals), the bean soup and fruit plate was a great starter too. I just recently started drinking coffee, it definitely has a kick.
Now for our listener question: What are the accommodations like? I would have to say the cabins are a little bit smaller than your standard cruise ship cabin but it isn’t cramped. Recently I was on Celebrity Reflection and Holland America’s Oosterdam, they were definitely larger. We have two twin beds in our standard balcony cabin on deck 10. We have a sitting couch and little table in front of it. The vanity has two 100v plugs and two 220 plugs. The balcony has a little table and two sitting chairs on it, again not cramped. I travel with a lot of gear so it’s usually troublesome trying to get all my gear put away but there are 12 drawers, two closets to hang garments, storage racks in the bathroom and a safe. I’d say it’s decent for a standard balcony.
Tomorrow is San Juan, Puerto Rico where we get to experience it as a local – a longtime friend of mine goes to college there – he’ll to act as our tour guide.
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