CANEEL BAY

We rented a car for a couple of days to cruise the island by ourselves. We don't need no steenkin' taxi. Anyway, one of the places we drove to was Caneel Bay, both to check it out, and to go parasailing from the Caneel Bay dock.

Caneel Bay used to be the Rockefeller estate on the island until they gave 2/3 of it (the island, not the estate) to the government to use as a national park. The estate is now an incredibly expensive exclusive resort - it's so exclusive it doesn't even have a sign at the road to let you know where the heck you are. We drove past it about seven times before we figured out which driveway to take. Anyway, rooms go for $575/night to $1000/night in season (not including food or extras - you heard me right), so if you've got lots of benjamins burning holes in your pockets, they'll be happy to relieve you of them. Usually, there's a guard at the gate, but not this time - we just drove in and parked in the lot.

What you see above is the remains of the sugar plantation that used to be on the estate site. The whole island used to be littered with sugar plantations until sugar beets put them out of business in the mid 1800's. God, the weather was perfect.....

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