Capital: Charlotte Amalie
Population: Approximately 25,000 people
Language: English
Location: 60 miles east of Puerto Rico. Its northern coast borders the Atlantic, while the beaches on the Southern coast skirt the Caribbean Sea.
Size: The island is the second-largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands. It's approximately 12 miles long and 3 miles wide, and has an hourglass shape.

Although we told ourselves we weren't interested in duty free shopping, the snorkelling over at the beach near Coral World was not as spectacular as we expected. So after 3 hours of snorkelling and lying around on the beach we headed to Charlotte Amalie to check out the town. You can see here that it's quite crowded - packed with cars going everywhere, and millions (okay, maybe we exaggerate a little) of cruise ship passengers buying lots of expensive things. Since we just finished grad school, we weren't in the market for gold or diamonds. :) But something did catch our eye - alcohol! And at what great prices! If you drink, make room in your bags to bring back some name brands for cheap prices, and several kinds of liquors we hadn't seen anywhere else before. Our favorites: Duchalet swiss chocolate liqueur and Buba Touee, a lime flavored rum like substance.

Instead of taking a bus or taxi back to our ship, we decided to walk back (and it's not very far; seemed like a mile or so). We had a chance to see a little more of the town that way as well. We stopped off at an old fort that's been turned into a nice museum, with historical information about St. Thomas and replicas of what things looked like many years ago. The top of the fort offers a nice view of the hustle and bustle of Charlotte Amalie; in fact, that's where the picture at the top of this page was taken.

The cabin was quite comfortable for us. This is what it looked like for most of the cruise - the sitting area was converted into a double bed, which was promptly made every morning as soon as we went to breakfast. The service was really amazing - every night after dinner we returned to find the sheets turned down and chocolates waiting for us on our pillows. We found sleeping on the ship very comfortable, but several of the older passengers complained about the rolling of the ship.