Please pardon my brief hiatus, but I’ve been roaming a bit lately, collecting tons of splendid notions from faraway places to share with you.
A recent stop was the beautiful island of St. Barth’s in the French West Indies, where Captain Splendid and his crew took first place in their class in the annual regatta, Les Voiles de Saint Barth’s.
This is our second time at this race, in between our visits this elegant little rock was devastated by Hurricane Irma so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
While some sections of the island were absolutely demolished and still under repair I was happy to see that most of the charming cottages which adorn the streets of Gustavia survived with minor damages.
The island is decidedly French today, but in 1758 Sweden’s King Gustav III took possession of the island until it was sold to the French in 1878, so there is a certain Swedish look to some of the architecture and all of the street signs are still in both languages.
Though there are plenty of spots on the island that still need a great deal of work it was so impressive to see how well they have cleaned things up in order to host this event in such a short period of time.
I’m not sure how much of this damage was from Irma, maybe this old cottage had just run it’s course, but the patina of the shingles and the shutters is still beautiful to me.
The high end retail shops on the main road are mostly up and running, which is pretty amazing, considering the floods of water that ripped down this lane. Unfortunately, due to a different type of devastation, the doors of the original Calypso Saint Barth store remain shuttered, trop triste.
The airstrip was only closed for a couple of hours after the storm, but this lovely old plantation home {see it in it’s previous glory in this video} on this famously short strip with it’s steep approach has yet to receive the TLC it needs.
Thank you to all who have worked so hard to bring Saint Barthélemy back to it’s former glory and best of luck in all future efforts.
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