USVI Day 2

FYI - get used to the ridiculous turquoise water. That's just how it is. All the time. 

We saw St. Thomas in the daylight but this morning was the first time we really got to experience what St. John looks like - which is much different. Here we enjoy minimal population / development, just trees and water. 

So we woke up to this out the windows of our house:

Cruising through "town" past one of the marinas / mooring-bays.

I think this was taken at "Picture Point" - seems like it is appropriately named. We saw a max. elevation of roughly 1200-1300ft which seemed pretty decent to me considering how small the islands are. Lots of the roads are extremely steep.

A large portion of this island is a national park so we stopped in at the main NP office to check it out. It is next to a marina.

More really refreshing open-air architecture in a main wall of the park office.

Above the NP office was a trail which connected to a couple different beaches. We hiked out to Solomon beach which, fun fact, used to be the nude beach before the park service adopted new rules a few years back. 

Note: this "fern" did not curl up when touched. (Inside-joke warning - we were looking for this all week)

At Solomon beach, now wishing we had brought a change of swimming gear. The water looked great and it was on the warm side. The sun absolutely blazes down on you here.

After a hike back to the park office area, we stopped for a snack/lunch. There were a bunch of apparently wild chickens around who were happy to eat almost anything thrown to them.

Jeeps were everywhere. It was clearly the main rental vehicle in use. There were a few non-rentals that I saw (had body-color hard tops etc.) and a good chunk of the other vehicles were Grand Vitaras. 

We went to Trunk Bay for a first try at some snorkeling. Water quality here is great and there was a lot to see. I have some GoPro videos that I'll post up pretty soon. 

Trunk Bay itself is on the right side there. It is supposed to be one of the most used beaches as cruise-ship traffic homes in on it whenever they are nearby. I didn't think it was really busy at all, but we are still in the off-season yet.