We began our day in the most French way possible — with a visit to the local patisserie. I had a pain-aux-raisin while Nicole had a tried and true pain au chocolat. I cannot emphasize enough how much it feels like I’m in France’s Côte d’Azur (the French Riviera) and not an island thousands of miles away in the Caribbean. Between the food, the scooters, and the plastic bottle caps that don’t fully come off and go straight up your nostrils when you try and drink, it has a much more European feel than the BVI or Bonaire which are affiliated with the British and Dutch respectively.
After our petit-déjeuner, we began our day of plane spotting. I have an app that shows scheduled flights and also shows them on radar when they take off. You would think this would be helpful in knowing when to show up to watch the planes landing or taking off. The problem is that the schedules appear to have been gutted during the offseason, so even though a flight is scheduled, it doesn’t actually happen. Other planes don’t even file flight plans, so they show up unexpectedly.
Nevertheless, sometimes with planning and sometimes by chance, we were able to catch some planes landing. The famous roundabout that the planes must dive over had its own viewing platform. I will attempt to illustrate in this post just how bonkers this approach is and hopefully some photos and videos can better portray the skill required to pull this off.
A normal airliner for example would have a descent rate of about 500ft per minute until the last 50 feet. If you watch commercial airliners land, they have a nose-up attitude for most of the approach. Then we usually cut the power and do what’s called a flare where we arrest that descent rate by raising the nose even more to hopefully round out to a nice buttery landing. With a long runway, you can really finesse the last few feet and get a few “Nice landing!”s from the passengers on their way out. In St Barths, you can throw all those techniques away. These planes dive down toward the end of the runway.
The video I shot above is from a beach at the departure end. From there, we got a good view of planes cresting just over the hill, diving down for the runway, and flaring at just the last moment to try and plant the plane before running out of runway. It doesn’t look easy, and in the video above they appeared to be doing some training. The fact that our Tradewind pilots made it feel totally normal yesterday is a testament to their skills. The area around the airport is the only flat piece of land on the island. All the other roads twist and climb in ways that the little Kia Picante was finding to be a bit of a challenge on its tiny engine.
Our day wasn’t exclusively airplanes, just mostly so. We went to the town of Gustavia, the big town on St Barths. This is where you would normally find your Hermés, your Cartier, and other high end shops, but this time of year they were all closed. In fact, the whole town seemed dead. We stopped off for a bit at the lighthouse that overlooks the town and did a few circuits back-and-forth into town just trying to find anything open. Nothing.
We grabbed some croque monsieurs for lunch near the airport before heading back out to try and relax on a beach somewhere. We packed the little Picante with some beach chairs and an umbrella that were at our apartment and headed off to Gouverneur beach. It was fairly empty, and we planted ourselves in our chairs under the umbrella. Within five minutes, we saw the sandflies and other insects swarming around our feet. So much for relaxing. We packed everything back up and drove to a much larger Monoprix in the town of Lorient. We bought a small aloe just to cope.
We then fancied a little snack at a patisserie. There were a couple on the island that we thought would be open, but they apparently close around noon — different from their hours posted on google. What does a girl have to do to get a mille-feuille around here? This whole offseason thing is perplexing. It’s like everybody shuttered their shops and cafes and left the island. Fewer people driving on these wild roads is nice, but it does make acquiring food or souvenirs rather difficult.
Before dinner, I went back out to watch a couple more planes land at the airport before calling it a day. On my way back to the car, I spotted a family of red-footed tortoises. These are very common around the island especially in the waning daylight. They were always crossing roads in front of our car. We patiently waited for them to do their thing. Walking back from the airplane-spotting, I saw them going to town on a piece of cactus. Impressive digestion really with all those needles.
We finished off our pasta for dinner because there are likely no restaurants open anyway. The plan for tomorrow is to take Tradewind back to San Juan followed by any number of flights to Orlando. The problem is that all of these flights look bad. So…there’s that. There is a distinct possibility that we will get stuck in Puerto Rico, but that would be a fitting bookend to our trip because even in the offseason, there is a large degree of unpredictability with seats. Mais, peut-être que nous aurons la chance. (Maybe we’ll be lucky)
passports & pepto bismol 