Grand Case is, according to our guidebook, the culinary capital of St Martin. But it doesn’t seem to be reachable by public transportation, so we teamed up with Kraken to rent a car for a day. And since, then, we’d be driving around anyway, we decided to do a counter-clockwise loop of the island. So our first stop was a viewpoint on the way to Philipsburg, again looking down on the harbor and Villa. If you zoom in a little you can kind of see her – she’s the furthest-left catamaran in the bay right in the middle of the first two pictures..
We made a quick stop for a beach visit before Philipsburg, at Little Bay.
And then we basically blew right through Philipsburg, looking for a coffee place that turned out to be closed. We did snap a picture of this place, which oddly seemed to encapsulate the vibe pretty nicely.
But we continued on up the coast, and eventually found that coffee in Oyster Pond.
There didn’t seem to be much else happening there, though, so we got back in the car and headed north to Orient Bay, where we found a lot of restaurants. Closed restaurants. Remember back when restaurants were only closed because of the time of day?
So on we continued, and we made it to Grand Case. Well, we did contemplate a quick stop to sell our pneus and get some pneus neufs.
We had a bit of a detour involving unmarked 1-way roads, but eventually we found Grand Case!
And maybe more importantly, we found lunch. I got excited about creole food, Jazz and Gracie were super amused by the high-backed chairs.
We wandered a little more, and found some beaches and flowers and things.
There may also have been some shopping.
We eventually made it back to the beach, for coffee and cocktails and some nice views. Apparently there has been some erosion here.
But despite top-notch advertisements like this one…
..we found that most of the recommended restaurants were still closed, whether because of Irma or just low season. So we opted to go back to Orient bay for dinner. And we were glad we did, because we had very good food and a visit from a local foie gras enthusiast.
Also somewhere along the way we saw this statue of Lady Liberty.
Great photos, loved the commentary! Interesting…but a little dead to my liking.
To our liking as well!