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Hello everyone, and happy Monday! I read a post on one of the tourist-focused Facebook pages recently that asked what it’s really like to live on St. John. After the second sleepless night due to another WAPA outage, I thought today would be the perfect day to let you in on a few island-living secrets.

Let’s start with WAPA. This is our power company, which stands for the Virgin Islands Water & Power Authority. It is unbelievably unreliable, yet we pay some of the highest electricity costs in the world. How fun is that? Our power plant is located by the airport in St. Thomas. The power crosses the island and then goes under the water from Red Hook to Frank Bay, which is in Cruz Bay. The power plant in St. Thomas is antiquated and goes offline more than I wish it would. We had a stretch last season when we didn’t lose power for months, which was amazing. Well, that amazingness has ended.

Something’s happening over at the power plant on St. Thomas, which is prompting “scheduled” blackouts. But does anything really stick to a schedule in the islands? Nope. So neither are these outages.

We first lost power on Saturday night around 8 p.m. There are two feeders in St. John. I lost my power at 8 p.m. and it came back on at 10 p.m. The second feeder lost power at 10 p.m. and it came on at midnight, I think. We lost power a second time that evening sometime around 2-4 a.m.

The power went out again yesterday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., and again from 11 p.m. until about 2 a.m. It went off again while I was sleeping and then just came back on at 7:15 a.m. as I am writing this. I think Nate Fletcher said it best a few minutes ago…

For those of you who are vacationing on St. John today, give everyone you run into some slack. We’re all very tired.

You’re probably thinking, well get a generator. We do have a generator, but the extension cord that we use with it is over at our construction site in Fish Bay. Island life! 🙂

Here are a few other island life moments from over the years…

I woke up one morning to a frog launching off of my head and onto a nearby window. I’m still not sure how he even got into our bedroom.

About a year or so back, Dalton asked me to come outside to check out the beautiful flower he found in the front yard. It was a very large and fuzzy tarantula, not a flower at all. We put a bucket over it, and daddy relocated it when he got home from work.

You know the bug that killed the Baobob tree here on St. John? It’s called a mango borer beetle. Well, one walked by my front door one day, and it was the size of a small kitten!

I was chatting with friends who purchased a home here a few years ago. When I started complaining about the state of the shower in our new house, they informed me that their house didn’t even have a working bathroom when they moved in, which meant they had to number two in a bucket outside for the first few months of living there. But we’re living in paradise, right?!

Oh and then there was the time that a family of bats moved into my house when I was in the States giving birth to Dalton. They made a home in the wall right behind my bed, so I would hear them squeaking every time I fed Dalton in the middle of the night. We finally were able to get them out of the wall (safely and without hurting any of them), but one of them didn’t get the memo. I was washing my hands in the bathroom that was attached to our room a few mornings later when the water splashed back into my face. I looked down and there was a little baby bat in the sink. He, too, was removed from our house safely. 🙂

Random fact: The bat is the only mammal that is native to St. John. 

All of this being said, I still love it here. But life on St. John isn’t always easy. You’re going to sweat at night, have frogs on your head, bats in your wall, and who knows what else, but it’s worth it for many of us, because this place really is paradise. Not to mention it’s fun to commiserate with your friends and other residents on social media at all hours of the night when we’re having sleepless nights due to WAPA. We’re in this together, folks!

And for those of you who are planning a vacation here, there is no reason to second guess visiting us. Most vacation rentals have generators, so you’re good. And I’m fairly certain that they do not have frogs in the bedrooms or bats in the walls.

That’s it for today, folks! I am going to charge everything under the sun in this house now, because I’m losing power again at 11 a.m. Yay WAPA!

Today marks the third week that I am officially a St. John homeowner. A lot has happened over the past three weeks, so I thought I’d post a little update for all of you who are curious about what owning a home actually entails on this island.

Let’s start with living space. The home we bought had a whopping 622 square feet of living space, and that included a screened-in porch, which really isn’t living space in my opinion. Talk about tiny! This is what $475,000 buys you on St. John, folks! We’ve been living in a one-bedroom apartment for three years (due to St. John’s insane rental market), so we knew that we could make this work.

But before we moved in, we needed to make space for two bedrooms. I thought the easiest and most cost-effective way to do this would be to enclose the screened-in porch and convert that into two very small bedrooms. It’s really going to be one large bedroom with some sort of non-permanent partition due to building codes, but we will make it work! Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

We are unbelievably lucky in that one of St. John’s best builders just happens to be our neighbor. He graciously offered his knowledge, so we knew how to best enclose that space. We were able to get this done in one week, which is pretty incredible here on St. John.

Now onto the main living space. The kitchen was a bit tired and the appliances were older, so we decided to renovate this space completely. Well, let’s just say this was easier in my mind than in real life. This part really reminded me of those home improvement shows on TV where they keep finding little things wrong. Well, every “wrong” thing costs money, so I now temporarily renamed the home The Money Pit – lol. Its real name is Snail’s Pace. 🙂

For example, there wasn’t tile under some of the cabinets, so I need to figure that out. The way the cabinets were screwed to the wall meant huge chunks of sheetrock needed to be repaired after the old ones were removed. You know, fun things like that. Lucky for us, another neighbor is unbelievably handy and is helping us fix this part of our mess.

All of this being said, we have made tremendous progress in three weeks. We enclosed the porch, installed six actual windows where screens used to be, and removed the old kitchen cabinets and appliances. The taping (compound?) and sanding on the new sheetrock are almost complete and painting should start in the next day or two. Our new kitchen cabinets are being delivered in Miami today, so maybe if the stars align, they will be on island next week… fingers crossed! I don’t know everyone, but I think I may have a new house to live in soon!

The clock is ticking. We are supposed to be out of our Gifft Hill apartment and completely moved into this new house by the end of the month. Wish me luck!

I’ve taken a few weeks off of my island tours to focus on the house because time is of the essence here. And forgive me for not writing as much as I would like to, but we’re in a time crunch here. I’m basically playing general contractor while Mike is making people’s dreams come true over at The Beach Bar every day. It’s hot, I’m dirty, I’m sweaty, and I feel like I’ve been covered with sheetrock dust for days, but you know what, I’m loving every minute of it!

I’m going to resume tours next week, so go ahead and secure your date!

All of that being said, I’ll post another house update soon. Have a great day everyone!

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September 6th is a weird day in my world. It’s probably a weird day for many of my friends too. On one hand, you can’t help but think about where we were six years ago at this very moment. But on the other hand, we just want to keep it in the past. It’s an odd juxtaposition.

When I woke up this morning, I wasn’t sure if I would even write today. Like what do you say? Do I write about Irma or do we act like that today is just another day? Well here I am, and here are a few of my rambling thoughts… 🙂

I guess I’ll start with the fact that not everyone wants to talk about Irma. I’ve been asked about it for six years while on my island tours, so it doesn’t bother me that much. I do, however, get goosebumps on my arms every single time that a guest asks me about that day. It’s interesting how your body reacts to certain things.

I’ve been at restaurants over the years and witnessed people sit down and immediately ask their servers or bartenders about the storms. No hi. No how are you doing? Just tell me about a day that scarred you for life. I completely understand the curiosity, but again, it’s not something everyone wants to relive or chat about. Just something to think about, and I hope I don’t sound like a jerk saying that.

Someone walked into The Beach Bar a few weeks back and basically told my other half that we should all be “over it” because “it was so long ago.” Well, not everyone is. 🙂

Ok, on to the positive! I was floored at how quickly Mother Nature bounced back after Irma! As you probably know, most of our leaves were stripped from the trees that day. But miraculously, just a few weeks later, we had buds on the trees again. Amazing!

I saw some crazy stuff the day after Irma. The craziest was a piece of steel that was dangling on a powerline in front of Margarita Phil’s in Cruz Bay. It looked like a guardrail or something of the sort. It was bent in half and just dangling over the street. Crazy.

I was over at Gallows Point a few days later and chatting with Akhil, the general manager, when he told me to look up. A door frame was dangling in a tree high above our head. That was also pretty crazy.

I was overwhelmed by the love we received following the storms. I still cannot thank you all enough for donating to so many great organizations and for coming back so quickly that year. I had so many first-time visitors on island tours that winter, which was just mind-boggling to me. I asked why they were here, St. John still hadn’t fully recovered, and most stated that they heard we needed tourism dollars. I cannot count the number of times I got a little teary-eyed on island tours that winter. I blame my pregnancy hormones for that, of course! – lol.

This island has come a long way since Sept. 6, 2017. We’re a resilient little bunch, and there is a lot of love down here. We’re gearing up for another great season, and I hope to see many of your faces this winter. Now go ahead and start perusing for airfares. Start browsing villas, and book that trip!

I love ya all. Thank you so much for reading.

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