Riding The Hog in St. Martin

What a fun day. I loved St. Martin. I have enjoyed all our ports so far but mostly because of the fun excursions while we've been on the islands, I loved the island of St. Martin because it was something I haven't seen before. The other islands have been beautiful, green with nice clean waters but that's what we lived for 5 years. St. Martin was filled with cactus, it was more brown but still green, huge iguanas and countless sailboats. It was a new beauty and the perfect weather only added to it all.
We decided that we would rent a little scooter for the day and explore the island on our own. It was small enough that the rental company claimed you could tour the perimeter without any stops in just 1 1/2 hours so we figured we would have plenty of time to stop and play whenever we wanted.

We started in Philipsburg and headed in a counterclockwise direction. We knew that there were a few spots that we had to stop at but other then that we just drove. The roads were pretty good and other then the iguanas running out in front of us we didn't run into any problems. We did however witness another fellow scooter renter wipe out on his bike which was a little scary because he just laid there and wouldn't move. Finally I got off my bike because his friends weren't doing anything and asked if I could lift the bike off of his body for him. Finally while I was trying to lift this heavy bike off some dude his friends snapped out of it and came to help and we took off for the beach.

Our first beach stop was Orient Beach. It was long, with good waves and lots of people. People in clothes, people in swimsuits, people in half a swimsuit and people with nothing. I know you're not supposed to take pictures but that has never stopped me before so I snapped this cute couple all matchy matchy. I love them and I don't even know them.

After our stop at the beach we continued on our way stopping a couple times so I could take a few pictures with my camera. At one stop I walked up onto a platform to get a better view of a cove filled with sail boats and the trees started shaking like crazy. I was startled and confused wondering what I had stumbled across. I found a couple of huge iguanas running down the tree trunk and felt a flicker of satisfaction that at least I'm scary to something because my kids sure don't find my scary 'get to bed now or else' face all that scary.
One of our must see stops is that airport landing strip that borders the beach. I had personally never heard of it but Ryan had seen a couple different clips of it on YouTube so just had to see for ourselves how low these planes actually are when they pass the beach. Thankfully there was a warning sign because it's always nice to know when I might be endangering my life!

While we were driving through one of the little towns we noticed this big old rusted boat just off the beach. I have no idea why or how but it sure looked really cool.
We also stopped for a little bit when Ryans face got stung by a mystery bug. No fun at all, but the pit stop was really pretty. It was this massive white beach with our cruise ship sitting in the background. If it wasn't so smoking hot and my bum wasn't so numb from our drive I might have been in more of a swimming mood. Instead we just lingered a while before finding our way back to the ship to fill up on that wonderful buffet!