New Year's on St. Lucia!
Happy 2013! We are back after a little hiatus. Rang in the new year on St. Lucia in the Caribbean. St. Lucia is a beautiful quite undeveloped island famous for its "pitons" (the gorgeous peaks seen in the pictures above) that frame Sugar Beach where we (and Gwyneth!) spent most of our time. Sugar Beach, now a Viceroy property, is stunning with chic, primarily white minimalist spaces opening up onto the jungle and the beach. We would have loved to have stayed here but alas they were booked up so we stayed next door at the much more modest (and less expensive) but still lovely Stonefield Estate Resort. The beaches on St. Lucia are public so you can go to any beach -- we checked out Sugar Beach, our favorite, and the beach at Anse Chastenat, an esteemed hotel on the island that feels a little tired and could use a facelift.
What we loved:
-Sugar Beach- chic and stylish and just lovely
-snorkeling is amazing on St. Lucia and fantastic that you can go just off the beach and see teeming tropical fish
-our half day private catamaran sail with Mystic Man Tours
What we did not love:
-the food on St. Lucia is frankly pretty awful. Even at the nice places. It was best at Sugar Beach's restaurants.
-the windy roads make it really hard and nauseating to get around
-the public beaches worked in our favor on this trip, but if we were paying top dollar to stay at Sugar Beach, we would be bummed to have boatloads of cruise ship people shipped in for the afternoon