St. John’s Antigua - Feb 21, 2015

The island of 365 beaches, one for each day of the year, this is Antigua. As with the other islands we have visited this one also has its beginnings with sugar plantations going back to the 17th century. Today, St. John's serves as one of the more developed on the Lesser Antilles. Here you have top of the line shopping with boutiques filled with couture clothing, designer jewelry along side the many local fashions in the open air market places. For us this was once again an easy day, we walked through the gates and mixed with the many taxi hawkers until we settled on a $12.00 each return taxi ride to Jolly Beach with four Brazilians from the Costa ship. This is easy, so if you are here the prices are pretty much fixed but the more you can get into a taxi the cheaper the price. The hawker sets you up, takes you to the Taxi station, get the driver takes you the van - in our case a newer model Mercedes, nice and comfortable for the 25 minute drive each way. The ship was offering a value priced excursion to Dickenson Beach for a fair price but a but too early for us to go to a beach or we would have taken it. As it turns out, all in the ship's tour was probably only $5.00 more. We have noticed many of the excursions are priced pretty good.

Back into St. John's by about three o'clock gave us enough time to get the vibe of this very colourful town. It was a Saturday here which meant everyone was out and seemed to trying to out do each other with sound systems and Boom Boom music (must be getting old). Speakers the size of vans set up so when you walked past you whole body shook, crazy and yes colourful. Back to the ship for a great sail away as the steel drummer played "over the rainbow" an actual rain bow appeared, pretty cool.

Tomorrow is actually a repeat port for us, Castries, St. Lucia - turns out we were here last year. We did an all day taxi tour on April 23, 2014 which ended at a beach resort in Soufriere. So this time around we are doing an excursion on a Catamaran taking us from Castries to Soufriere. The ship will leave Castries at three o'clock to come pick us up at Soufriere at five, should be a great day.

A few pictures from today, hope you enjoy…