No room service breakfast this morning, too much stress looking for trousers. We decide we’ll eat healthy at the Aqua Spa pool. Junior Miss is of course sleeping in and taking a later breakfast in her room.Coffee, juice, yogurt, fruit…while enjoying our food we start chatting with a couple at the table next to us. Turns out they’re from Montana, I’ve always wanted to visit Montana so this is interesting to me. As we’re discussing some of the differences between Bozeman and Manhattan, a woman from the table behind us mentions that her and her three traveling companions are also from Montana. What are the chances of that, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of people in Montana to begin with. I innocently ask them that if they’re all here “who’s watching the state?” Sometimes my sense of humor really does only amuse me.

We hit a hot tub for a little bit, back to the room, get dressed, grab the child and disembark to find a cab as we’ve landed in St. Kitts. A man in a rather official looking uniform directs us to a van where Alex the driver takes us on a harrowing ride on the edge of some steep cliffs (the view is wonderful but it would really suck if we fell off) to a place called Frigate Beach. Apparently it’s where they take all the tourists when they ask to go elsewhere, but then they get there and they say “Frig it, we’re already here, might as well stay”.

Two of the guarantees about islands in the Caribbean – spectacular beaches and locals selling everything from beads and trinkets to dental plans working those same spectacular beaches. There’s no shortage of folks wanting to braid your hair, sing you a song or brush your teeth for you. So as soon as we settle in a guy in a big brown hat asks us if we’d like to rent some jet skis. That actually was good as that was something we had wanted to do this day. We tell him we’re going to hang for a little bit but we’ll be over. We get a Carib and some frozen beverage, test the waters and slather on some sunscreen. Junior Miss was getting a little antsy so we walked over to the short pier and rented ourselves a couple of jet skis.

Truth be told we’re both pretty experienced on these things – taking some time to ride whenever the opportunity presents itself. However, heading out away from the bay we noticed immediately this was not going to be a normal ride. It was pretty choppy, no wait that’s an understatement. It was more or less tidal wave conditions out there. The plan was for her to take a full ride and I was going to split my time with Chrissy. Seeing as how my wife doesn’t really like to get splashed and will generally ride along without pressing the throttle, I thought it might prove to be a life threatening ride for her.

So we’re doing the best we can not to die. Going faster to try and fly over the waves, riding along the horizon, or against it. Taking it at an angle, nothing prevented both of us from being wetter than we’ve ever been. The water kept smashing us in the face making it virtually impossible to see most of the time as well. It was great! At one point I decided to head in and see if Chrissy wanted to give it a shot, but the tide was pushing out so fiercely it took too long to get in, and we’d already pretty much used up the time. Junior Miss pulled in a few minutes after me, we shook the water out of our ears and nose and headed back to our lounge chairs.

Stumbling over the shells and sand we came upon Chrissy relaxing on the lounge as a handsome young shirtless man rubbed her feet and legs. We learned that his name was Sherman. I guess she was pissed that we didn’t get in fast enough to tell her she probably didn’t want to ride anyway. So Sherman goes on feeling up my wife while I go pay for the Jet Ski rentals.

So they finish up and smoke a cigarette and we figure it’s getting near 3pm, so we should start packing up. We’d asked Alex to pick us back up then and we’re figuring we’ve got at least a 50% chance that he’s actually coming back. We walk around the bar area for a little while, Junior Miss orders a coke and gets one with lots of rum – oops.

Then we see a huge 1800 pound sleeping pig (wouldn’t that then technically be a hog?) a few goats and monkeys, then a nice Rasta man hands Junior Miss a monkey wearing a dress to have sit on her head.

Yup, it was a typical St. Kitts Wednesday afternoon. We’re busy feeding cucumbers to the monkey when we notice Alex waving at us. He wasn’t really saying hello, he was telling us to get our fool asses into the van, we heading back to the port.

We’ve got some time before the boat departs, so we visit a local restaurant for a delicious jerk chicken lunch. Then we visit a duty free shop for some booze and smokes. It was called “Booze and Smokes”. Crazy deals, but the challenge is getting and carrying it back to the US. A huge bottle of Mount Gay Barbados Rum, a bottle of Frangelico, a bottle of Johnny Walker Gold and a carton of Marlboro for $90 combined. If we bought all that in the United States it would have probably run over $300 – the Johnny Walker Gold alone is a $200 bottle. There was a bottle of The Macallen 18 year old for a buck twenty five – that’s an easy $300 bottle here if you can even find it, but I know my luck, it would break or get stolen in transit, so I reluctantly left it behind. Oh well.

Dinner at Blu was a little like facing a spurned ex-girlfriend. It was like they all knew we dined elsewhere last night. Obviously, they knew ‘cause we weren’t there, and when we’re not somewhere we normally are, we’re missed. Everyone wanted to know what we thought, how was dinner, where the fuck were we? Truth is, it really wasn’t as good as Blu, and we were happy to be back. One example of why Blu is the best restaurant on the ship – Junior Miss decided on the first night that they must put crack in their peas because the peas are so delicious. Tonight, she receives a veritable “jackpot of peas” as they bring her a huge bowl of extra peas.

We try to be creative at dinner, coming up with a catchy name for the child’s blog. Chrissy relates a conversation she had with our stateroom neighbors about how comforted they are to be out at sea on a ship “surrounded by 2000 Grandma’s”. That would make an interesting marketing slogan for Celebrity Cruises. Junior Miss is reading the sixth or seventh Harry Potter novel on the trip – for a few moments we thought it would be a fun idea to take pictures of her sitting in as many different seats as possible reading – literally a different seat for every page of the book. Then we’d speed shoot all of the photos together with a background of a great piece of classical music and post it on You Tube so it could get like 40 billion views. Then we realize the effort that it would probably take and we just say fuck it.