Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas Trip

Who says we don't move around? We made it from Tortola down to St thomas yesterday. Since it was a holiday on Tortola, we decided we might as well get some "stuff" done down here.
The autopilot had had a lightening strike during the storm, so we had to hand steer (and boy is that tedious!) however, now that he is a circuit board genius he managed to bypass the burnt parts on the circuit board and at the end of the trip we had autopilot again! Went first of all into Crown Bay to get diesel (usually seems to be the least expensive here) and the price was $4.81 today. Could not believe how EMPTY the marina was! I thought it was a ghost town when we first went in here, just a few permanent boats.

Then we made our way through the gap to Charlotte Amalie Harbor

as our destination was the Yacht Haven Grande Marina, for a couple nights. We have some shopping to do and back forth, and quite frankly, my motto this year is making things easier on us and crew, so humping everything into a dinghy to get it back to the boat was not really on the agenda.

I also thought, "great, I will have high speed internet and cable" Yeah, right, cable worked (pathetically, like marina cable ALWAYS does) for about an hour and the high speed internet is about the same speed as what i already have on the boat. Once again, I really hate this cost plus plus pricing that happens everywhere. May be forced to offer and use it, but I don't like it! This marina has also got to be haemorraging money. 1 restaurant out of 3 open and about 3 boats in this large place as well. You pay an extra $5.00 a day for garbage, (whether you have any or not), $5.00 a day for security, (not sure what that entails) and although they have electricity it is not in any shape that we can use so you have to rent a splitter box at $15.00 a day just to plug in. I guess they only want the super mega yachts, but about now, they will take whatever there is!
My daughter in law had asked for a Vuitton diaper bag for when the baby was born. (I personally think all that stuff is ugly, but what do I know!) Since there was a Vuitton store here at the marina off we trot (Bazza and I ) last evening to pick this up. Now I knew that being designer it was going to costs many hundreds of dollars, (and she had said she would be fine with a knockoff) but picture Bazza AND I both on the floor in epilectic fits when we were told that it was $2200.00!!! FOR A BABY DIAPER BAG!!!! It was not even a piece of camera equipment!! I did tell the sales lady as much, and she said that we were buying the dream, and that it could be passed down for generations, and it was something even men would not mind carrying...none of which stopped our epilectic fits! So onto EBay I go.....
Here is a just a couple random pictures and then off shopping we go. A nice little moth...

and for my mom, pink flowers of some kind or another!