After walking off the plane, we immediately hit the road, and this was the first beach that we saw. Unfortunately, we had to climb those hills.

After reaching the top of the first (and one of the biggest) set of hills, we took a break on a bench strategically placed with a great view of the St. Thomas airport runway.

Looch poses atop a rocky outcrop at Stumpy Bay, where we slept our first night. Constantly posing for dramatic pictures, it was hard to keep him moving in the right direction.

A view towards Stumpy Bay from the aforementioned rocky outcrop. We ended up sleeping just to the left of the edge of this picture. "Rocky road, man."

That's me in the hammock. The first night we slept right next to the water, but that turned out to be a bad idea with the constant crashing waves.

An elevated view of Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St. Thomas and the mecca of Caribbean bound tourists. You can see two of the cruise ships in this picture.

This is a picture from the water at Magen's Bay, rated as one of the top 10 beaches in the world by National Geographic. It was very nice, but we'd see better ones later, especially on the island of St. John.

If you look closely, you can see the dark green lifeguard chair on the left where I hung out for hours. It's like one of those MagicEye things where you have to stare for a while and it just appears.

On the second afternoon, we thought we'd be able to find somewhere to sleep near Coki Point. We found a nice beach and some great snorkeling, but there was too much development for a safe place to camp.

So we had the brilliant idea to take the ferry over to St John as the sun was setting. The view of St Thomas from Cruz Bay was nice, but it's hard to find a good spot to sleep when it's already dark.