Kidoctr's Progress Notes: Day 3 - Celebrity Summit Thanksgiving Cruise – Monday 25 November

So my first mistake in St Kitts was assuming it was a USVI – I had told the kids that it was and I was expecting to continue having 4G available but when we woke up that morning, I had a text message letting me know that I was roaming and going to incur additional charges.

Welcome to St Kitts

We got to sleep in some because our excursion wasn't until after 11 am so we had breakfast ordered for 9 am. Someone had told Wade and Charlie to expect to get muddy so we decided to go ashore a little earlier just to buy some t-shirts to wear so that we could get them muddy instead.

St Kitts definitely had a different feel about it – less developed than St Croix. As soon as we stepped off the dock, we were accosted by people selling things. We did see the rep from Beulah Mills right away but we told him that we were going to do someone shopping and that we would be right back. We walked down a bit towards the shops and a guy with some small monkeys tried to get us to take some pictures. I asked how much – he said “3 pictures for $10” so I told him we would be back even though he put one of those monkeys on my shoulder.

We picked up 4 t-shirts for $40 and a St Kitts magnet and then headed back towards the dock to meet our guide. I wanted to have a picture of the kids with the monkeys, one of the 4 of us together, and then one of the 6 of us together. The guy with the monkeys wasn't listening to me, was very rude, and cursing under his breath at other people. I snapped some pictures and then had Wade snap some of the 4 of us. I handed $10 to the monkey man and he said it would be an extra $10 for the extra people. I told him I would give him $5 more because we took more than 3 pictures but wasn't going to give him any more than that because he didn't tell me about the charge for extra people. He begrudgingly took the $5 and I'm sure he was cursing at us under his breath as we walked away.

We made a bathroom stop in the casino right next to the pier gate and then met up with our driver who took us down to the parking lot and we got into a small van. The A/C didn't work very well and even I was getting warm on the way out to the excursion. It didn't take us long to get to a grassy area with a gazebo in the middle – there was another group from an earlier ATV excursion and they didn't look too badly muddy. They said they did have fun.

Our tour guide showed up a short while later after we had been given helmets and signed waivers. I tried not to pay too much attention but the helmets were a little gross. We were taken over to an ATV and given instructions on how to start, throttle, shift, and brake on them. Our tour guide mentioned that it would be ok to leave it in 2^nd gear the whole way but that was definitely not the right thing to do. We got to practice for a little bit and then off we went.

He took off pretty fast and I was at the rear taking my time making sure I wasn't going to crash or flip over on that thing. Just when I was getting the hang of it, we rounded a sharp bumpy corner and came to a stop. Amina had gone off the path and her ATV was stuck in the grass up against a tree. That was the only real issue we had – the rest of the ride went pretty smoothly except for the occasional stall (you really can't go too fast in 2^nd gear but then if you shift up to 3^rd gear, you can't make it up some of the hills). We did stop for a little bit at an old sugar plantation, got off our ATVs, and our guide walked us through the old building and then pointed out a Sour Sop tree. We zipped around for a while longer on our ATVs and ended up taking some extra trails according to our guide because we were moving along pretty fast.

Sour Sop fruit

The ATV excursion was a lot of fun – those guys let us go as fast and slow as we wanted to and there were plenty of hills, bumps, ruts, and rocks along the way. The view in a few places was really gorgeous with the ocean in the background.

We rinsed off with some soap and water – our hands were filthy (my fingers were numb and my thumb hurt from pushing on the throttle for so long) and we had gotten a bunch of mud on our shoes. After rinsing, we had some drinks (including Carib beer and free lemonade), paid our guides and tipped them really well then took the little van back to the dock.

We got back pretty early, got cleaned up, and by the time Peter came around with the canapes, I was starving since we hadn't stopped for lunch. I worked on my TR for a bit, downloaded my pictures to my laptop, and then got ready for dinner in Normandie.

We opted for the 4 course menu in Normandie but Seth and I both ordered the caviar and all 6 of us shared it. The Lobster Normandie was prepared tableside. Dinner was good but it was very very slow for whatever reason. It took us 4 hours to have 4 courses – we left the restaurant after 10:30 pm. Both the main chef and the pastry chef came out to speak with us – I don't know if they did that with everyone or if it was because we were suite guests or if they were just apologizing for how long we were made to wait between courses.