USVI

One of the best things about Magen's Bay was getting there. We'd driven up and down the same road twice (the first time looking for a place to turn around actually) and some Cub Scout den mothers stopped to ask us if we needed directions. They were very nice and one of them, a very proud Alumna of an American college/sorority led us in her car, driving rather fast on the hilly, windy roads. Once we got to the other side and were about to descend, that first glimpse of the turquoise bay ringed with white sand and palms, gave us that feeling that we were about to step into a postcard. After the beach, we drove east, looking for somewhere to eat and ended up at Duffy's Love Shack in Red Hook, St. Thomas's second town. It's considerably less picturesque than Charlotte, though with more accessible services like drug stores and a post office for (middle-class) people who actually live on the island and already have enough duty-free diamonds. Lots of "regular sized" sailboats here. When we got back to Charlotte, there was a music festival going on and we watched one of the acts, the JDPP Jamerz. These were all kids from the JD home ("Taking Weapons form the Hands of Children and Replacing them with Musical Instruments"). They played with the enthusiasm you'd expect from kids on furlough and the small crowd reciprocated with encouragement.

We crossed to St. John on the ferry and this gave a strong impression of just how small and how close together these islands are. We sailed form Charlotte Amalie and of course we didn't go into each of the little bays and inlets. In a rather slow boat it took maybe 15 minutes to get out of the harbor, 20-25 to get down to the east end and then 15 to actually cross the straits of open water between the two islands.
St. John looks a lot like St. T when you arrive with a rather large hotel on cruz bay and a concentration of shops and cafes on the waterfront. Town however, is very small, and the country is much more wild. This is largely because it mainly national park and so there's little in the way of either tourist-oriented or local construction, but probably due to a slightly different climate. It was raining very hard when we arrived in St. J and the vegetation was much more thick and green. St. T was dry and rocky with a lot of cactus-like plants.

We rode in a jitney, a big pick-up truck with three or four rows of open-air seats in the back. They are very different from matatus in that: they leave as soon as they've collected a few passengers, the drivers are sometimes women, and they cost a good bit, probably as much as taking a private taxi on the mainland. But as Nate said, "Riding in a truck sure is fun." Almost as soon as we got out of Cruz Bay we were inside the National Park. As always, I felt incredible gratitude for the NP System, seeing both that so much of the landscape was kept in a natural state and that it was available to anyone who wanted to visit it. This is the double whammy of the resorts-- they clear an enormous amount of land, re-finish it as an artificial "landscape" and then restrict access so that empty chairs far outnumber people.
We camped at Cinnamon Bay and I think we all liked this beach the best of any we visited. It was relatively large, maybe because it had once been two bays that "grew together". There was a sandy point at about the halfway point with a sizable cay a couple hundred yards offshore.