For Monday, we had made reservation for Anse Marcel Beach Club by email. They said they could not promise a cabana, but it depended on how big the crowd was. In a perfect world, we would have gone there on our anniversary, but since our anniversary was a Sunday AND Father’s Day, we figured there would be zero chance that we could get a cabana on Sunday, and I’m sure we were right, as our waitress said that they had served over 200 people on Sunday.

We left the house at 11 am for an 11:30 reservation for our chairs. I thought we had been to Anse Marcel before, but Eric didn’t remember, if we had. We weren’t really sure where we were going and thought we had missed the turn, but weren’t sure. There did not appear to be a sign at the corner where you turn for Anse Marcel. The road looks to be going straight up a pretty steep hill, but it really isn’t nearly as bad as we thought it was going to be. It is not as steep as the hill going up to Princess Heights, in Dawn Beach. There are some blind corners, but it is a two lane road, so just stay in your lane. Just keep going and you will pass a big sign board on the right that says Anse Marcel, so you know you are somewhat in the right place. Come down the hill and head toward the left. We took this picture as we were leaving.




The circle is where the restaurant is, so just look for those pointy roofs and aim for that area. Once you’re down on the flat, you make a left turn just before what used to be a guard shack, possibly for Secrets? I don’t know. Anyway, we finally arrived and there is ample parking for today. I can’t imagine the parking situation the day before, with 200 people!!


The beach itself is not that attractive to me, darker brown sand, and I’m sure when the hills are green, not brown, it is prettier.


We gave the lady our name and she led us to a prime location. I doubt you get front row chair here, even on slow day, as this one was, unless you have a reservation. I was somewhat surprised to see plastic cups for wine, but they are pretty. I wouldn't mind having one as a momento.


The fellow brings the food menu and the wine menu and soon brings our drinks. If you want to take a look at the menu, pictures of the menu are in the Anse Marcel picture gallery, although I apologize, as the quality of the pictures isn’t too great. There appeared to be only one guy working the beach and he hustled! The water is very calm and there is no drop off and no rocks in the water. That was certainly nice, although I find as I grow older I’ve become much more of a ‘pool’ kind of person anyway.

We watched this little guy come out on the beach and plow straight out into the water, so I’m sure he had been there before.



We headed up for lunch and were very pleased to have a cabana, although it was not really not busy.


In fact, they only used the front row cabanas on this day and one of those remains empty all day. I decided to order the crispy pork cheeks, which I don’t know what it is, but took a chance. The waitress tried to explain it to me, in vain. It turns out that it is basically pulled pork, so we wrote it down for the waitress so she could tell the chef, to be able to describe it better for the American audience.


Eric had shrimp and scallops.


I did not really understand the description of the desserts on the menu, but I had the third one on the menu, as the waitress said it was lighter.


Eric got the rum soaked cake and it was!!!


The food at AMBC was really good, but quite frankly wasn’t as good as the meals we had at Cote Plage or Le Pimente, but the experience overall of eating in the cabana was really special.

We headed back to the chairs for a bit and then headed home.

After such a big lunch, I didn’t want a big meal, but did want something. And since I never got my pizza the first day, we ended up going to Al Dente for carry out. Eric dropped me off at the restaurant to order and headed to Leader Price for some wine (I swear SOMEONE has been getting into our fridge and drinking all our wine!! We had never been to Al Dente before and from the outside appearance, I didn’t expect much. However, it was quite pretty in there, with very good a/c. The next time, I think I will definitely eat in there! This time, we took our pizza home and ate it on the couch. No pictures, sorry, but the pizza was pretty good!!

Tuesday we have scrambled eggs and ham for breakfast, along with mimosas.

I just don’t know where the days go. It’s so lovely here, that you just want to grab hold of every minute and savor it! We didn’t do much this day, like or other days, other than hang out in the pool and watch the boats go past. We got a kick out of watching the jet ski tours do a big circle in the vicinity of Happy Bay


Lunch is grilled chicken sandwiches.

We decide to head back over to Orient Village for dinner. We were able to park just to the side of Sao restaurant and head for Cote Plage, which was a great choice! Orient Square is so much more attractive to me now that Grand Case. There is lots of parking, and there was a decent breeze this evening, even though the weather had been pretty hot the whole time.
We ended up ordering a salad and two entres off the specials menu.



We enjoyed a lovely special salad of hot goat cheese on toast, with bacon and walnuts


Eric had the whole sea bass special, which the lady expertly cleaned in what seemed to be under 30 seconds!




I had the special beef rib eye, which is a small piece of meat (LOL!), along with fries and an excellent pepper sauce.


Dessert was coffee gourmande, which was absolutely wonderful, and I hadn’t seen it offered on any of the menus anywhere else.

The meal at Cote Plage was easily the best meal overall of the trip, followed by Le Piment, and then Anse Marcel Beach Club.


This cat thought that Eric might share his sea bass with him, but he was sadly mistaken.


We got back to the house around 10, one of our later trips out and I was grateful for the security gates.

Wednesday was our last full day and we did not plan on going anywhere and we didn’t. Breakfast was cheese omelette with ham on the side and mimosa.
We packed up most of our stuff in preparation for going home tomorrow. The maid came to clean and asked us if we wanted her to leave, which we were afraid she wouldn’t get paid if we told her to leave, so we had her stay and clean. Lunch was a chicken stir fry with cashews, onion and celery.


We did some laundry and enjoyed a last sunset, along with steak, baked potatoes and salad for dinner. It will be really hard leaving this place tomorrow.



Thursday we looked on the internet and saw that our plane was late leaving Atlanta. Fortunately there was no one coming into the villa for a couple of days, so Jules said that we could say as late as we wanted. Delta was automatically extending people another day on island if they wanted, but I don’t know if they would have paid for accommodation. Regardless, we just wanted to go home. We knew that we would definitely miss our connection in Atlanta, as our plane was due to land at 10:00 PM and our flight to Orlando was scheduled to leave at 10:30. But we knew there was another flight to Orlando at midnight, so we wanted to try to get on that flight. Due to a screwup on my part, Eric got booked on different flights than I did, and was scheduled to spend the night in Atlanta and leave the next morning at 7 AM for Orlando, and I was booked the next day. Once once we knew the plane had actually left Atlanta, we headed out to the airport, turned in our car, and got our flights changed to the same ones. We only had a short wait in the airport, where we had a drink and then headed to the plane for home.
The flight again was probably less than half full. We had booked Delta Comfort for the trip home and ended up getting three DC seats for the two of us, for the leg from SXM to Atlanta. We went to the counter in Atlanta and they put us on standby on the midnight flight, but went ahead and gave us a hotel voucher, which was for the Intercontinental, as I recall. I didn’t think about it at the time, but they didn’t give us any food vouchers.

I had requested wheelchair assistance in Atlanta and am so glad that I did, as in addition to the airport being freaking HUGE, getting to the new gate was a total clusterf*ck, as the train had stopped running for the night. So, after customs and re-checking our bags, we had to go outside the airport and take a BUS to the other terminal and go back through security again. Even with wheelchair assist and no line for C & I, it took us well over an a full hour to get to the new gate. I never would have figured it out on my own, as the wheelchair guy was even kind of confused. We were two of approximately 20 people on the wait list for the midnight flight, and were among the last to get onboard, although there were some who didn’t. We didn’t get Delta Comfort seats for that leg, which we had paid for, but that was no biggie, as we were just happy to get home, at 4 am…


SUMMARY We had just a lovely time and thoroughly enjoyed staying almost totally on the French side this trip and are making plans for another ‘French tour’ in the near future. While it will never replace Beachside Villas in our hearts, we would love to be able to stay at Villa Canoua again, if we can swing the cost. Thanks for coming along!