Philipsburg, St. Maarten

Tuesday March 29, 2011Friends from our church were going to be on a cruise ship docking in Philipsburg today. We had e-mailed each other our plans to get together. We had talked to a taxi driver on Sunday about taking us there but plans changed andthe time we needed to leave changed. I met him at the original time 8a.m.to tell him that we now needed to leave at 9:15 instead. then Charlie and I walked to Sarafina's a lovely bakery shop for breakfast.

Then we met our taxi driver, George Flemming, who used to workfor Easter Airlines but is now retired and does the taxi job for fun. Many of his family live here on St. Martin and have held elected office of mayors, senators and governor. after he dropped us off on Front Street in Philipsburg in the Dutch side of the island. we walked around a bit to get a feel of the town. It has a very long and lovely beach. there were 5 cruise ships docking today so the town was crowded with cruise ship passengers, many of whom were being delivered by Water Taxi. Our friends had told us to meet them at 11 a.m. at the "Terminal" which we took to mean the Cruise ship Terminal. So we asked directions and walked the mile to the "Terminal" where we could not go inside without a boat ID card. We waited an hour and no one showed up, so we started back

toward "town" stopping in at Chesterfield's restaurant for

some lunch. We watched a square rigger boat come into the dock and also watched three 12 meter sailboats in the bay.

After lunch we proceeded back to "town" while passing by the restaurant "The Green House" I heard so

meone yell "Sharon". Amazingly our friends were eating

lunch outside of the restaurant and saw us walking by. We joined them as they finished their

lunch and further explored Philipsburg, even going into their small museum. Philipsburg is filled with jewelry stores, camera stores, Dutch tablecloths and pottery, and many shops selling hats and shirts and dresses. There are also tobacco and liquor stores all with duty free prices. There are also some high end shops (Swatch, Rolex, etc), but none of us were into shopping. Some of the buildings were pretty and quaint though.

Our friends departed for their cruise ship and we went to find our friendly taxi driver who met us a 4:30 p.m. We barely made it back to the boat before a long lasting rain started.