"My vacation in St Thomas, St Croix, St John" Top 5 Page for this destination U. S. Virgin Islands by monica71

We arrived late afternoon and spent at least 1 hour at the car rental place. We had a reservation, but in St Thomas all the car rental places are small and run by 1-2 people. We learned fast that being patient is key there. You can not expect fast service. After all, everybody is on vacation and you are supposed to take things slow :)
We spent few days in St Thomas, then 2 days in St John and about 8 hours in St Croix. Since St Thomas was the place we stayed longer in, I decided to dedicate the most of the pages to St Thomas.
We stayed at Sapphire Beach Resort. The building we stayed in was right on the beach. We had to pay a little bit extra for this, but it was worth the price!
This picture of the resort and the beach was taken one morning, when I woke up at 6am and decided to take a walk while everybody else was sleeping.
The resort beach is one of the best in St Thomas. There are not too many hotels/resorts that have such a nice, sandy and wide beach as Sapphire Beach Resort. I had no idea about this until we got there, but was surely glad we booked a room here. Most of the other beaches are very narrow, small (and crowded because of this) and with lots of rocks in the water.
The resort has a beautiful pool and lots of iguanas roaming around. They are very cute and I got some nice shots of them.
The resort also has 1 big restaurant (not cheap!) and one small one, by the pool area. The one by the pool area is like a bar on the beach, but they serve good food and drinks at very decent prices. They are not open all day long, though.
Our room had a kitchen with a stove and fridge in it. We had lots of pop, fruit and veggies in the fridge and also some other stuff we bought at the grocery store (close to Red Hook and just about 5 min drive from the resort). We always ate breakfast in the room or on the room patio. It was very hot and you could not eat too much during the day anyway. Lunch was mainly a salad made in the room or bought from the bar by the pool. Dinner was usually the main meal and we mainly ate outside the resort.
There are plenty of restaurants by Red Hook, with decent prices.
We ate at Caribbean Saloon, Off The Hook and Burrito Bay Deli. They are all by Red Hook. Burrito Bay Deli was the cheapest one, but the best seafood we had was at Off The Hook.

The Parrot Show at Paradise Point

There are lots of things to do in St Thomas even if you are not big on water sports. Here are some things that I would say are worth doing:

1. go to Charlotte Amalie and browse around the stores. The place is huge and you can find some good deals if you are into shopping. We just went to few stores and bought a few small things to take back home with us. Buy some Rum Balls or Chocolates (island signature) and have an easy lunch at one of the restaurants there. They all have nice seating outside, shaded, of course, from where you can look at people strolling around and also you can watch all the ships docking.

2. Take the Paradise Point Tramway (few minutes walk from Charlotte Amalie). You will see all the island from above and once you arrive, make sure that you go to the Parrot Show and take some pictures with the parrots. I have attached a picture that I took there during the show. Have a drink or an easy lunch at Paradise Point Bar. There are few shops here, but I really did not care too much about what they were selling. Also, things were a little bit more expensive than the ones you can find in the stores in town.

3. go to Magen Bay Beach, the best beach on the island. It is a public beach, breath taking! We drove there and had to pay few dollars ($6 or $7) to get in. If possible, avoid going there on a weekend as it can get crowded and noisy. We ended up going there twice, once during the week and once on a Saturday (very noisy and busy!!!!). If you have kids or if you have long hair, get some braids done. I paid about $10 to get mines (I had long hair at the time) and it was a fun and interesting experience.

4. if you have kids, take them to Coral World Marine Park, close to Coki Beach. I did not care too much about the place, the beach is small and crowded all the times, but the kids may enjoy the marine life they will see there. We also did a little bit of snorkeling here, but it is nothing compared to the one in St John. In my opinion, if you skip this place and go snorkeling in St John, you do not loose anything.

View from Mountain Top, St Thomas

We took the ferry to St John from St Thomas and spent 1 night on the island. We stayed at The Westin St John Resort and Villas. We did not rent a car here, we decided to take a cab since we really came to St John to do some snorkeling. There is really not too much you can do in St John except snorkeling! Bring your own equipment from home if you plan on snorkeling, you can save few bucks and use them to pay for a 1 day long snorkel trip. We brought our own from here. The best place to snorkel is Flanagan's Cay. The first day in St John we rented a Hobbie for 4 hours from Sail Safari and the next day we took a full day snorkel trip with them.

In St Croix we spent just few hours and rented a car to have the flexibility to move around. We went to Buck Island Reef and also visited a Rain Forest (head towards Frederiksted and you will see it).