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Hello all,

Welcome to the final installment of my report on the Villa. It’s been quite a journey and this time, we’re going to stay out of the water (sort of). If you haven’t read the previous posts in this series, I urge you to do that since, by now, a great deal of what follows builds on the earlier material. Also, as always, I must say that the following observations and experiences are mine alone and that the results of your own experiences in this regard may vary considerably.

With that out of the way, strap yourselves in for…

The Villa – Part 4


Shortly after we had become settled in the villa, I began the ritual “Western Internet Dance”. For those of you unfamiliar with the process, this is not a particularly physical activity (unless you have “anger management” issues) but it is common to many a business traveler. Each time you upgrade to a newer laptop computer, you’re told about the amazing advances in communications technology that now make it far easier to get connected without “all the hassle” of yesteryear! Oh the joy! Power up your shiny new machine and the built-in wireless Internet card automatically searches for a signal and then connects you to it so your machine can immediately start up your email service, call for room service, iron your favorite shirt and call your dog to tell him you’ll be home real soon. All of this made possible through the wonders of a reliable, high speed wireless Internet connection. Yep. That’s how they advertise it all right! Since so many of you travel, you and I know that this is patent hogwash. It seems as though every hotel and “hotspot” has a different system. Some are free and some charge. Some have passwords, some have special logins and some restrict access in other more devious ways. Some won’t work with black laptops or any laptop that contains plastic and still others will only work on certain days of the week. I don’t know why this is so and I’ve been in the PC game since it first really got started, in 1980. I mean, I actually understand this stuff and I don’t understand this at all, if you know what I mean.

During the Internet dance, the hapless laptop user will make several steps forward, backward and side to side in an attempt to get connected to the outside world. Connectivity rules our lives when we travel and we can be quite beside ourselves when it isn’t present, or doesn’t just “fire right up” as soon as we send electrons pulsing through the little machines that own us. In the Dance, we first power up the machine and then wait that incredible amount of time for our little darling to boot (even though I know the reasons well, it still irks me no end how long a PC takes to start up after all this time - and I remember when I worked at Microsoft in 1997, and a group of developers started the “On Now” initiative – I’d like to meet some of those creeps some day in a dark alley).

Once the laptop is up (stay), we click on the little wireless icon to see what networks are available (if you want to just think a minute about how technology has changed our lives, consider the fact that a good many of you know exactly what I’m talking about and none of us would have had a clue about this a scant ten years ago!). As we scan the list looking for our dance partner, we see the “available” networks… “fry_yor_mach1ne_1f_you_u5e_this_creep”… no thanks, then “warcrft_plyrs_wrld_dude”… Nope. And then, there’s ours, “knoll.house” with the signal at full strength. Perfect. We select the network and click “Connect!” assuming that it will do just that. This network is, unusually, “secure” in that it requires me to enter a “Network Authentication Key”. These steps of the dance are the ones going backward. Network Authentication Key?! I go over to the documents that were waiting for us when we checked in to the villa. No mention of a Key. It isn’t asking for a password, by the way, but I try some obvious choices anyway including such gems as “shifty” and “runswithastrangenoise” and some others but, of course, the permutations and combinations could be huge. The dance continues. I call the real estate company that we booked through but, sadly, it’s Sunday and on Sundays Sint Maarten becomes a tomb. No one is going to answer that call. More dancing ensues and I’m beginning to get tired of it. I want my “island time” and the importance of an Internet connection is beginning to fade. I decide to go without the laptop and deal with it all on Monday, when the island businesses have revived.

On Monday morning, while I am out doing the first of my island scuba diving, Sonia takes the initiative and calls the real estate folks trying to get the login information (even though I may be a technology professional, she’s also prone to CWD – Connectivity Withdrawal Disorder –and she’s got a bad case developing right now). They can’t help but they put her on to Luc Knoll, the owner of Coral Breeze and a doctor on the island. He’s a delightful guy and he tries to be helpful but his forte is healing people through medicine and not through technical support, which he readily admits. When I am back, and I speak with him, he is actually pretty clued up on these matters as is apparent from our discussion. We try several things (some of which result in those frustrating reboots of the laptop and the resulting interminable wait) and then he lets us know he will need to call us when he is at home so he can give us the key code. Several hours later he calls and gives us the code. Miraculously, all is well and we are finally on line and the dance is complete.

While I have him on the line I query him about the fact that he is using a secured wireless connection (since that is actually a good thing) and why he decided to do that and Luc tells us that he recently installed a new system since there was a mysterious major power failure at the airport that shut down virtually the whole Dutch side of the island. From his description of the incident, it sounded as though someone had energized a series of giant magnets and the combination of the power spike and the electromagnetic flux had caused all manner of electronic systems to be fried. This wasn’t mysterious to me, of course, since it had to do with underground construction, the Turkish Mosque next door and Saint Barth’s and I’ll tell you all about it in my island posts later. I didn’t let him know my thoughts, though, just in case local residents weren’t yet aware of the reasons for the tunneling. I didn’t want to frighten him or make him feel “left behind”.

It transpired that a “friend” of his had set up the new wireless modem which replaced the fried unit and he had also set up the secured connection, which led to the subsequent requirement for a Network Authentication Key. I thanked him warmly and recommended that he ask the Island Properties Online folks to include the key code in their welcome instructions. Trying to guess the code on your own might take thousands of years and well before that time most guests will have become so frustrated, they will have disposed of their laptops and most of their friends and nearby relatives. It’s hard to believe that there was really a time when we went on vacation and didn’t think about “going online”. I know you won’t believe this, either, but there was also a time when we could get through an entire day without talking on a phone when we were moving about from place to place. Now one of the prime considerations when we come to Sint Maarten is who we will rent a cell phone from. We were thoroughly impressed with the service and price we received from Sharon Harris and we actually rented two phones from her, but just think about that for a moment. We went on vacation to a tropical paradise and we rented cell phones. Two of them. I think if I could have rented an underwater cell phone I probably would have. Then I could actually describe to Sonia what was happening to me in real time… Hmmm, let’s see “Ploink!”, or maybe “Now, where am I?”, or “Hey honey, guess what? My tank just came off and is floating away in front of me…”. Perhaps this isn’t such a good idea after all!


When you leave the villa, you are supposed to press the “away” button on the remote control fob for the alarm system. Okay, but what we didn’t know (since we hadn’t been told) was that the system got a little bit of separation anxiety when it knew you were leaving. No one told us about this so, when we left one day and remembered to tell it by pressing “away”, it emitted a short burst of alarm horn as we approached the Tieros. I stopped and looked a bit puzzled but, since the alarm had stopped crying, I figured it was okay (our dog does this sometimes when we leave the house, so I’m used to it). We were then threatening the gate with the car when the damned alarm sounded again. Now I was worried that it would do this all the time we were out so I got out and pressed the “Away” button again. And, right on cue, it went off for about a second, and then did the same thing a few seconds later! Now I’m really puzzled. So I press “off” and wait. No sound. Now, I carefully press “away” and wait. The alarm makes a couple of brief, loud, chirps again! I press “off” and reconcile myself to the fact that all of our belongings will be gone and there will be a group of squatters living in the place munching on our groceries when we return. I then figured I better set it since it was there, but I was distracted briefly trying to figure out how to make up with the damned gate so it would actually open without all the hatred. I should have thought more carefully about that little sequence of events but, as is the way of such things, I didn’t. Hey, I was on vacation! The alarm was now shut down “off”. Big mistake…


We were returning from a bit of island driving and sightseeing that afternoon when, as we approached the airport from Simpson Bay, we noticed a sizable tropical downpour approaching from the east. I figured it would reach us about the same time as we got close to or had arrived at the villa, and it was kind of fun to watch the storm progress as we drove along the tiny little road that seems to always be crammed with vehicles. We drove around the airport past the departure end of the runway, still watching the storm, as were, apparently, a number of other vehicles on the road, which had by now lost all semblance of lane control. As we neared the gate into the airport right next to the WINAIR offices, it was lucky there was a work crew there to act as a buffer or I might have just driven straight on to the airport grounds while the beauty of the storm unfolded before us. It’s lucky the little Tieros is so small since I don’t think too many of the workers were seriously harmed when I glanced off of them. If we had managed to barge through their lines and shoot off across the apron, the tower controllers wouldn’t have been able to see us, of course, since the Tieros is much too small to be seen with the naked eye, and we would have surely been crushed by one of the people-shredding aircraft that was just heading off to the end of the runway to do its dirty work. It did occur to me, though, that driving this route would make for a neat shortcut to the villa which, at this point, was straight across the tarmac, saving me the trip all the way around the rest of the airfield by Maho Beach. Now, you might think that it’s pretty ridiculous to look for shortcuts on Sint Maarten when everything is close handy but remember, like an ant traveling across your lawn, distances that seem small to you are very large indeed to the little Daihatsu I was driving.

We stopped briefly at the Food Express to see if we could drum up any more of their pre-opened condiments and as we exited the store we figured we had just a minute or two before the storm broke over us and the villa. The aircraft tire-spinning folks at Maho Beach were still in evidence as the skies darkened and it was clear that the concept of lightning was totally foreign to them. When you see people like this, you have no problem dealing with the statistics that show that in Florida, around 40 people are killed each and every year when they are struck by lightning. If we were truly intelligent beings, that number would decrease steadily since we would learn from it. Think about it. Anyway, the lightning rod people were standing there trying to become clothing optional the hard way and waiting for an aircraft that would never come since any pilot or flight controller seeing the approaching storm would realize that there would be a pretty good show watching some [censored] point his beer bottle up to the sky and say “Wooo Hooo” just before he gets lit up like a Christmas tree (Fazzht!) and so the aircraft were going to put themselves into a holding pattern to circle above it at a safe distance and watch the action.

We scooted our little SUV on by pretty quickly since a human body struck by lightning can be such a good conductor that it can emit secondary bursts and I don’t know how to say “Whooo Hooo” properly since, when I went to college, Spring Break (where folks seem to learn how to say “Whooo Hooo”) usually wasn’t spent in tropical hedonism destinations but more likely meant working at some local retail establishment to help pay for your rent and things like that. Partying and screaming “Whooo Hooo” while scanning the array of nubile youngsters displaying their breasts at you was something that happened only in dreams. Maybe college in Australia was just different. At least it was free.

By the time we reached the villa and threatened the gate to get it to open, it was dark enough to need lights (although the security ultra-bright illumination system had curiously not come on – hurry up evil doers, now’s your chance!). We drove into the little carport and I shut off the tiny power plant by letting the squirrel under the hood know he could stop running the spinning wheel since we were “finished with main engines”. I’m sure he was relieved, despite the small size of the car.

I love dramatic weather. I especially love to watch the power of a sudden tropical thunderstorm as it unloads all around me while I am tucked safely under a structure like a carport or a porch. It’s really good in those situations since you can be “out in it” while still being safely under cover while the storm displays itself. This storm was going to be a doozy, too. I stepped out of the car and was standing under the carport as the storm broke all around and over us. The rain is so warm that, for a few seconds, I didn’t even realize that it was also raining on us! That is to say, I didn’t realize it up until it became obvious I could actually drown standing underneath my own carport. I look up and realize that the carport roof I had been parking under all this time isn’t a “roof” at all. It is really just a series of widely spaced strips of wood and is mostly open to the sky above. I guess it gives some curb appeal but it sure didn’t give any protection from the elements and I and the goods from the Food Express were soon soaked. Sonia had run ahead to begin the complex process of applying to the alarm system for access to the villa and she made a mental note of how to reach the kayak which had cleverly been placed by the side of the villa in case the access application was denied and we were swamped just outside our own front door. By the time I reached her, the application process was complete and the system decided to let us in. We rushed in to the relative dryness of the house straight on to that polished tile floor I was telling you about earlier.

If you have a tile or linoleum kitchen floor, a swimming pool, and a dog; place a small piece of fresh meat or something else that the dog absolutely loves on the carpet just beyond the kitchen (maybe in the dining room, right next to the entertainment center, there, on the right). Let the dog see the treat, then take the dog out and throw it in the pool. Once he’s really soaked, retrieve him but make sure not to dry his feet. Now let him into the kitchen, onto the waxed tile floor and watch the hilarious antics as he tries to make it to the meat. That’s probably what I looked like running inside the villa during the storm. Wheee… Feet don’t fail me now! Getting into this place with the alarm system could be quite a chore. After de-energizing the weapons system and then unlocking all of the various bolts on the door, you can finally go in and let the alarm know you have arrived (stay). Rushing in because of a storm can easily make you forget things and, today, the system had a little surprise for us. It was going to wait a while before springing it on us, though.

We dropped our groceries in the kitchen and then approached the living room windows (carefully, so we wouldn’t set off the curare tipped dart launchers and kill the guy fishing on the beach – fishing in a thunder storm, mind you) to watch the rest of the storm. This is cool. There’s nothing like watching the awesome power of the tropical weather when it is gathered up into a ball and played with right before your eyes. The rain came in torrents and it’s incredible to watch it play on the waves. We knew that soon there would be the light and sound show. Sure enough, there’s an incredible jolt of lightning (either that or an evil doer tested the pool for warmth and discovered that it hadn’t disarmed yet) and, within seconds, a giant crack of thunder that seemed to emanate from right in the bay sounded. It was one of those sounds you can feel and it was wonderful. It rattled the windows right in front of me and then rolled across the bay away towards the West.

Then, a new sound was emitted. It was new to us for all of a second or two until we realized… the alarm had been tripped! WhaWhaWhaWha… it went on and it was incredibly loud. My training immediately kicks in and I look for the first living thing that isn’t Sonia so I can kill it in a manly display of emergency response to the pending crisis. The only thing I can see that’s alive, though, is a stunned bird sitting on the flying insects’ sacrificial altar-table out on the patio looking like it’s having a seizure. I guess the VX nerve agent coated surfaces (a new feature of the security system only recently installed) are working pretty well. However, there’s no way I’m going out in this storm to help the little fellow and besides, this freaking noise! So I grab the Alarm remote control key fob (fob is kind of a neat word, but it’s not a patch on cummerbund. It’ still neat though) and press “Off”, since we are most certainly here, and we may want to go outside to save the little bird after the storm and we don’t want to get shot. WhaWhaWhaWha… nothing happens. So, just like those idiots who press the elevator button a second time (or more) even after it has illuminated, I press “Off” again. WhaWhaWhaWha… the sound is beginning to eat its way into our brains now. I fear that I’ll start acting like the little bird spazzing out on the VX outside if this goes on much longer. WhaWhaWhaWha… I press “Stay”, thinking that maybe the alarm thinks it’s a dog. WhaWhaWhaWha… Bad Dog! Then I press “Away”, hoping that I can wish the alarm system into the cornfield, since I know that the nearest cornfield is thousands of miles away in Illinois. WhaWhaWhaWha… Stupid Alarm!

I’m frantically pressing all of the buttons now. WhaWhaWhaWha… The noise is deafening (which is a really stupid way of saying it since I can hear it just fine, thank you). I’m still pressing buttons and I’m becoming concerned that the sound energy radiating from the stupid alarm system will be sending the approaching aircraft off their track. WhaWhaWhaWha… Stupid Alarm!! I frantically remove the battery cover from the remote to… check the battery. Why do we do this? I’m not sure how to tell if a battery is dead just by looking at it, but we all do this. WhaWhaWhaWha… I’m running from room to room holding the remote up at various angles and pressing all the buttons “off” “away” “stay”, trying to get a good “line of sight” between the fob and the alarm receiver unit (this is just as dumb as pressing the elevator call button again after it’s illuminated since the remote is a radio frequency device and doesn’t need line of sight to operate – of course, you’d have to be thinking straight to remember that), which, as my mind begins to go, I realize I didn’t check the location of with Ingrid. WhaWhaWhaWha… Sonia is lying spread eagle on the ground crying at the floor asking it to please swallow us up and take us to Montana. Actually, she’s keeping her cool. She gets on the phone and calls the real estate company but the young woman who answers can only tell us to call the owner, Luc Knoll. WhaWhaWhaWha…Next she calls Ingrid, the housekeeper, but Ingrid’s not home. We’re doomed! WhaWhaWhaWha…Beacon Hill Andrea’s caretaker, Cato, will soon be along to kill us both since we set off the alarm while her dog, Beacon, was sleeping and now he’s awake, and he’s angry…

WhaWhaWhaWha…Why is this happening to me?! I run like a crazy man around the house and point the fob at all kinds of things. Point it at the television. Off. Nope. The dying bird outside. Off. Nope. Under the toilet in the second bedroom. OFF! Nope. WhaWhaWhaWha… Help! I point it at the box of bran cereal in the kitchen, use a Fibonnaci sequence for the number of times to press each button (stay-13/away-21/off-34) and, just as I am about to really go off the deep end (away) and grind the remote fob to powder in the garbage disposal unit that we don’t have… the phone rings! The PHONE??!! WhaWhaWhaWha… and the damned phone is ringing! Who the hell wants to call us right now? I pick up the phone, and the alarm abruptly stops (off)…

There’s a few seconds of silence that I just don’t recognize any more. Outside the front door, I think I might hear the sound of Cato and a large dog approaching… “Hello! YES??” I’m so exasperated now I’m screaming at the phone as though it and I were possessed. “Hello sir, this is ADT, we noticed you had an alarm indication…” Says the pleasant lady on the other end of the line as though she was letting us know that milk was going to be two cents off regular price at the Maho Food Express this coming weekend and we might consider getting some. “You NOTICED we had an alarm INDICATION”?? Honey, the folks in Osaka Bay Japan now know about this alarm “indication”. Seismographs over at Montserrat registered the event and the survey crews are on the way. The sound of the alarm must have summoned evil doers from every corner of the island. I’ll give you an “indication” all right! Indicate THIS! It’s a good thing we weren’t speaking on a video phone since my raised middle finger was unnecessary and this lady was in fact just doing her job.

I calm down fast now, though, since I used to go through this sort of thing all the time when I ran a retail store in a shopping mall in Olympia Washington a few hundred years ago in my deep dark past. I know what’s coming next… “Can you give me the reset code?” She asks. Reset code? Ummm, no, I can’t give her that. So I say “We’re just renting the place and I have no idea what the code is…”. “Okay!” she says “I understand.” She “understands”? Either she’s heard this response a lot or the sound of my voice was a pretty good “indication” for her that I was truly unstable. She says she’ll need to contact Luc and have him reset the system. I guess it’s a lucky thing we weren’t evil doers, since we now had the run of the place by just uttering that little phrase. If you’re planning on breaking in to homes, stealing stuff and selling the occupants jewelry or timeshare apartments, simply remember to tell the authorities that “it’s okay. I’m just renting the place…” and they’ll back off and go speak with the owner instead. You probably shouldn’t try to sell a necklace to the authority that you speak to, though, since that might tip them off that you’re not really renting.

My composure returned, I then ask the ADT lady what the current status is of the nasty little alarm system. She says “it has set itself and is now armed again…” Oh, great! “Armed” again. “So, while we’re waiting for Luc to reset it can we be away?” I ask hopefully. “Huh?” she says. “You know, ‘away’, I mean can we go out? Will the alarm trip again?” “Oh, yes!” she says. Great! Now we’re prisoners in the villa. This means that the weapons systems are deployed (away) and ready to kill us or anyone else entering the half mile perimeter or “zone of control” in today’s jargon. I felt sorry for Cato but I knew Beacon would keep well away, being such a smart dog. “Can you reset it and make it “off”?” I ask. She’s wondering what version of English I’m speaking but that’s because she can’t see the fob I’m holding in my still shaking hand. “Oh no, that has to be done by the owner…” she ends the conversation.

The phone rings again and it is the villa owner, Luc. He’s quite cheery. “Hello, I guess I have to come over and reset the alarm. It will take me a half hour to an hour to get there but don’t worry; you don’t have to do anything.” Don’t worry?! We can’t move until he gets here. I explain my concerns. “Oh no no no,” he says in that curiously European way of saying no many times “…YOUR alarm is off. The alarm that needs to be reset is for the second part of the villa, next door!” The alarm NEXT DOOR??! You mean to tell me that we went through all of this and OUR alarm wasn’t even tripped? And, I set aside for the moment how I feel having just gone completely insane over something that never actually happened and then wonder just what set off the alarm next door. Are we about to be put through an endless series of Timeshare presentations by a series of evil doers who are, at this very moment, setting up their advertising displays in the house next door? “Then, what set the alarm off next door?” I ask tentatively. “Oh, that was probably the sound of the thunder that set off the motion sensors that detect if anyone touches the windows…” What?! Touches the windows?? You mean to tell me that this evil little alarm system is so cranky it will start screaming if a wayward bird, stunned by the VX, “bumps” into the windows? Now, to me, that’s really overdoing it. Keep in mind what just set the thing off, a thunderclap… on a tropical island! When that happens, Luc has to get called by ADT, drive to the villa, access the security panel, and use his code to reset the system. All the while the neighbors have had to yell to each other just to be heard for ten minutes or so while Coral Breeze was announcing to the neighborhood something they already knew; that there was a thunderstorm nearby. Madness!

Something else occurs to me too. What happens if it trips again before Luc gets here? I ask him and… “Well” he says hopefully “…you could just go out... Then you wouldn’t hear it!” Oh great. We leave and a mob of angry Beacon Hill residents descends on the structure to raze it. I’d actually feel bad for Shifty and Runs-With-a-Strange-Noise, if feeling bad for them were possible. They’d be killed by a crazed mob enraged in a thunderclap-induced frenzy. However, the alarm didn’t go off again, and, we presume Luc reset the code, though we never actually saw him or heard a report from the barrel of a mini-gun (lucky he’s a doctor) but I can tell you that we spent the rest of the trip leaving the nasty little alarm shut down (off). We’re still alive, so I guess the evil doers were unaware or were having better luck using their sales pitches to terrorize other hapless tourists. We spoke often of whether there was a practical need for such an elaborate and sensitive system, especially given its proclivity for sounding off even in a simple thunderstorm. Again we wondered if the system was set up mostly for our mental comfort (like the inward-facing ADT stickers) rather than for any real effect it could have. If an evildoer was actually going to break in and sell us something, they’d be in and out with the signed title deed in their hands long before ADT could send a rapid response hit team to push the terrorists into the electrified pool. I guess we’ll never know since we never actually tested that little theory. The “oh we’re just renting the place, not killing anyone, don’t worry” thing did make me think, though. How would she know? I guess Sonia and I just aren’t likely targets for evildoers. Good.


One of the items I had pointed the alarm fob at in my mad rush around the house was the huge television that sat atop a cabinet holding various pieces of entertainment equipment. I had to hand it to the folks from Island Properties Online in just how thorough they were in preparing the place for us but, in the detailed security background check they obviously missed that we had moved from South Florida to Virginia a couple of years ago. I know this because the TV was set to only receive South Florida television stations. The few times we watched it we were amazed to see car ads from dealerships in Miami, check out the weather for the US and Southern Florida (over a thousand miles away) and see what was on sale this week at our “local” Publix supermarket! We typically don’t watch much TV while we’re on vacation, but we like the news and usually try to find local stations wherever we are. It proved to be difficult to find anything local on the set, when it decided to work at all. It was a bit of a shell game to use it. There were three remote control units and it appeared as though the correct combination to making the set worked varied at random and may have been based on a permutation of the number of pedestrians “popped” on Saba that day. Or was it the number “popped” on the previous week? I guess I’ll never know. If you kept pressing various buttons on each of the remotes, eventually the television would spark to life, just about the same time as you needed to be leaving (away). Exercising the remotes was a perfect task for a curious lively little baby, but we didn’t have one of those and I wasn’t sure how to ask Ingrid for one. Try as we might, I still don’t think we knew the exact combination of “Power”, “TV/VCR”, “Mode” and “Line” buttons to press on each remote to reliably get the set to just come on. It had two personalities, too. You could get it to switch on and tell you what was happening in Fort Lauderdale that day (interesting, but hardly central) and there were times when it would switch on to an entirely different set of channels but there was often no sound and we couldn’t make out what was actually being displayed. That may have been the local Dutch channels and, since Sonia and I are romantic, they may have been restricted to us but we never managed to find out what they were.


In the front grounds of the villa, there are a series of tropical shrubs in a sandy soil and a couple of carefully placed lava boulders. It’s really quite nice. We noticed, though, that there were several small holes a few inches in diameter leading deep into the ground, especially alongside the concrete path leading to the door and around the base of the boulders. When we arrived, or when we walked out of the front door, we would occasionally become aware of a sudden movement of something disappearing into one of the holes. We weren’t sure what it might be. It was too big for cicadas and too small for snakes or evildoers, but it was definitely something alive. When we returned to the villa one day, we found the answer. There, on the steps in front of the door, was Claws, a large crab with his big pincer extended in a threatening gesture towards us. “Stay Back! I am guarding the villa and you must not pass!” he seemed to be saying. Or maybe “Answer me these questions three, hehehe”. Either way, he really didn’t seem that intimidating and I made a note to tell Luc to get a bigger crab as part of his security detail. We stepped over him as he stuck up his claw (“I’ll have your toe… Come on! Try me!”).

After going through the ritual alarm deactivation process, and successfully applying for access to the villa, we dropped our things inside and then came back out either to better get to know or to do battle with Claws. He was gone. Sonia found the largest hole in the garden, since it was the only likely place he could have gotten into and she then sat down to be “very still” so Claws would come back out and play with her. She loves small animals (so why is she with me?) and I think she might have just simply stayed there until we left at the end of the week if I hadn’t gently suggested that we might consider moving on since he definitely knew she was there.

The weird thing about all of this was that Claws must have told his friends that we were okay since, only from that point on, we saw dozens of crabs crawling around the patio area out the back around the pool. They hadn’t been there the first few days and now they were everywhere. They would duke it out with each other on the seawall ledge or wander around the tile floor in a game of “dodge the human”. There was also the world’s smallest species of crab roaming the grounds that was about the size of a human fingernail and about as threatening. One night a hermit crab the size of a pair of dice was walking along the edge of the wall searching for a drink. I became concerned that the air molecules it was moving as it plodded along might waft up and set the alarm into hysterics, so I placed some water on the ground for it away from the villa and it dutifully headed off. It was fascinating and I wondered why they had waited to come out until Claws sounded the all-clear. I also wondered just how he managed to do that.



Despite the interesting times with the alarm and our times with Shifty and Runs-with-a-strange-noise, we know we have found the one and only place we will stay when we are on Sint Maarten. I’d hazard a guess to say that we would, in fact, book our flights around the availability of the villa, rather than the other way around. From our point of view, the access to the various kinds of shopping that we needed to do, the comfort and privacy and the good service from the owner, the housekeeper and the rental agency made it all work well for us. If I owned the place I’d change a great many things. But I don’t own it and none of those things really amounted to a hill of beans when it came right down to it. We were never bothered by the neighbors, despite the fact there were people in the houses on either side. The airport was hardly a distraction, even if one didn’t like the sound of aircraft. And, without reservation, the best thing about the place was the fact that it was situated on what was, for all intents and purposes, a totally deserted beach and pleasant little bay. Sonia and I could have spent an awful lot more time just sitting on the patio (in a weapons systems blind spot) holding each other and chatting aimlessly while listening to the waves and staring at the ocean. We love to just sit and hold each other almost anywhere, but doing that at Coral Breeze made it much more special.

Rent this villa. You’ll be glad you did. And… say hi to Claws!

Thanks for reading to the bitter end of our observations on our little home away from home. We’re nearing the end of our journey now and only the observations on the island itself remain to be disclosed. There are some big moments coming up, though. You’ll meet the emperor, find out about a means of transport you didn’t know existed and learn about a new species of animal you have actually seen many times on the island but were just unaware of it.

Until then…

James