Maho Beach St. Maarten (Airport Beach)

Maho Beach was the only thing I wanted to accomplish while visiting St. Maarten because it is one of the most unique beaches in the world. There's nothing particularly amazing about the sand or the water (although both are surprisingly great and an added bonus). For Maho, it's all about location. And that location is basically on the runway.

Watching the planes fly just barely overhead is a lot of fun. And trying to time a picture of the moving plane behind you while not looking at it is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. But luckily there are quite a few small planes landing and taking off to give you practice.

But the most fun is when the big jets take off.

Happy SXM Day!

No, not S and M. SXM. It stands for St. Maarten. And today was his day.

So first, some history. Because nobody I asked knew what St. Maarten's Day was celebrating (independence? just a holiday because our island is great? the day Columbus discovered the island? - that last one turns out to be true, but not why the holiday exists) and I thought it was interesting when I looked it up. St. Maarten was an actual person - Martin of Tours (Tours is a city in France, and therefore probably not pronounced how I'm saying it). Anyway, Columbus saw this island on November 11, 1493 (although he never actually landed on it - he really just saw it and claimed it for Spain) and since it was St. Martin's Day (yeah, the holiday already existed in 1493), he named the island St. Martin. And it stuck, even though the Spanish didn't colonize it until after the Dutch and French did. The Dutch spell Martin differently, hence, Sint Maarten.

Anyways, the government forced all retail businesses to close, which they didn't tell us until yesterday at 4:48pm. I was planning on working all day because we had five ships in town. It was supposed to be a very busy day and it was the main reason I flew down this week as opposed to later in the month. But this was what our store looked like today:

The cops drove down Front Street every 5 to 10 minutes to make sure every store stayed closed. They even shut down a lady selling handmade crafts from a table in an alley! I was very frustrated that we couldn't open, but there was definitely nothing I could do about it. So I went on an adventure.