Friday May 13

the skies looked decent this morning. Headed to Orient and arrived around 9:00. I took a nice walk from Club Orient down to Coco Beach Bar. A couple hours later the dark clouds started rolling in. After a brief rain shower, we left the beach around 11:30.

Lunch was at Yvette’s in Orleans. Another long time favorite restaurant of ours. Both meals of St Maarten Chicken and Stew Conch were excellent! Felix introduced us to Ruby Bute, who was dining at a nearby table. She came over, took my hand, and showed me her beautiful paintings on the wall. It was wonderful to hear her story as to how the paintings came to be. The paintings, done in 2020, are on broken hurricane shutters found after Hurricane Irma. Ruby described them as “something good coming out of something bad”.

Spent a fun afternoon with friends at Mary’s Boon, running between the indoor and outdoor bars to avoid rain showers!

Takeout dinner from Driftwood consisted of pepperoni pizza and salad. Both very good!

it was a pretty rainy day at Simpson Bay too after a nice morning. Hopefully today will be better.

It ended up being a wonderful day!!

Ok now that is really teasing us, showing us lunch from Yvette's! While I love both of your selections, I can never get past ordering Creole Snapper filet. What makes the meal complete is the fried Johnny cakes, plantains, rice and peas and Felix's homemade salad dressing. I think we ate there 3-4 times when we were there in Dec/Jan.

Nice story about Ruby Bute. One time a couple of years ago I was visiting her at her home, and she had done some paintings on doors. They obviously were tall and quite beautiful. She's an amazing woman. Glad you were able to meet her.