Heading Off to.......

Heading off to St Martin/Sint Maarten today, yeah right ..... only in my sketchbook. As Lockdown drags on and the weather is grey and dreary lets do a bit of virtual travel in my posh holiday memories sketchbook. Here we are kicking off with a map of the island, interestingly a wee island divided between French and the Netherlands. The upper part is French and the lower part with the capital Philipsburg, is Dutch. The border goes right through the Simpson Bay Lagoon where our hotel was, you can see the lagoon in the photo. 

Our holiday was in 2003, at that time the Island was a gourmet mecca, with Michelin starred restaurants all over (with those kind of prices too). Our hotel had a fabulous restaurant where we ate for 200€ per night, fortunately included in our half board. Food wise we were spoilt rotten, the local supermarket/deli made fresh baguettes every day, ours were filled with roast beef and Fol Epi cheese; best baguettes ever! Just perusing around the supermarket made your mouth water, great variety, lots of products flown in from Paris (the most beautiful petit fours and gateaux) apparently shipping wine bottles from France ages the wine by five years. 

Here we are in Marigot, the French capital which I strolled around often, enjoying the flair, the jewellery (more about the jewels, because they really, were later!) and shopping at the market. 

When leaving the hotel with our snorkelling stuff to walk to a local bay, people often stopped their cars and offered us a lift, the license plates with ''the friendly island'' were spot on! 

As always I was desperate to ''see'', everything so we hired a car and headed off to tour the island ..... I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to see everything but one lap of the island took about 2 hours! No worries about missing out then. 

St Maarten is famous for having the most dangerous airport in the world, the Princess Juliana International Airport, surrounded mostly by water you come in to land over the beach and barely over the heads of those lying there, quite some sight and not for the faint hearted!