St Bart’s memories Tom Smith

Professor Rappaport sent me this  amusing piece by Dave Barry about his recent trip to St. Bart’s.  (Please read it after this post, because it is funnier than mine.)  It brought back memories of the last vacation my lovely wife Jeanne and I took before we started throwing yung ‘uns.  We stayed at this lovely hostellerie, the, or les, as they say there, Trois Forces, a sort of New Agey retreat where each of the seven cottages is named after a sign of the zodiac.  I am sure neither what a hostellerie is nor what became of the other five signs.  It is true, as Dave Barry suggests, that there are a lot of naked French people there and movie stars.  Indeed, after a memorable lunch at Castelle’s (pronounce Castle-lays and not spelled as I have done so), we debauched to the most fabulous of St. Bart’s several naked beaches.  Whom should we run into in the small gravel parking area but Meryl Streep, the famous actress, who was, however, fully clothed.  She also had with her one of biggest, scariest women I have ever seen, and having taught at UC Davis, I have seen some.  I think the scary woman was her bodyguard.  We actually had a brief conversation about how I should move my jeep so she could get out, and her bodyguard glowered at me, though in a very glamorous way.  We promenaded to the beach, where numerous couples lounged about in states of complete nudity, much to my horror and fascination.  One thing I noted was that there seemed to be a lot of fat middle-aged men with lovely young women whom I doubted very much were their neices.  I also saw a guy from New Jersey I had met earlier walking about nudily, and I immediately thought him a traitor.  You will be relieved to learn that I did not take off my swimsuit, nor did my lovely wife, even though this was at least 20 years ago.  If you can’t keep your clothes on while the French around you are taking off theirs, you have no right to call yourself an American.

The food was really, really good.  The Trois Forces is owned by a famous chef, Hubert Delamotte, who seemed to me at least particularly good at cooking fish.  It’s an island, and they have lots of fish.  Meryl Streep came to eat at Trois Forces while we were there, but that night we were out somewhere else.  You are expected to eat at a different restaurant every night, and the help at Trois Forces would both recommend places and let us know whether we had chosen wisely.  Everything was shockingly expensive, and because it is all in francs you are constantly having to figure out how much everything costs in money.  You have to do that over and over because it can’t be right that your planteur just cost you $35.  A planteur is a planter’s punch, made out of oranges, mangos, rum and so on, and is actually worth about $35 if made properly.

Flying into the island is exciting.  We flew in in a small, dilapidated plane with another couple that was better looking than us, at least he was.  Everyone seemed quite terrified, but I could see the pilot was radiating a boredom so intense it was hard to believe there was any real danger.  He kept having to turn off the stall warning buzzer on the plane; at the time I thought it was funny that he was flying so close to a stall.  I’m not sure I would now.