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All About the Extras
Babysitting is available for a fee. The gym, in a separate building, has glass walls and two air-conditioned rooms with good equipment. The property also has a small spa. Along with massages and treatments for adults, the spa offers 25-minute massages, 25-minute facials and manicures and pedicures geared toward children.
Just a few blocks from the resort's entrance is a grocery store. The resort will pre-stock requested items for your villa. You pay for the groceries plus a fee for the service. Before our arrival, we happily filled out the form for our selected groceries and faxed the list to the Westin. Hungry after a long day in transit, we looked forward to snacks of fruit, cheeses, crackers, chips and salsa. Alas, our cupboard was bare. The front desk told us our order would arrive the next day. It didn't. Somehow, it took three days of a four-day vacation for our groceries to arrive. By then we had purchased so many things at Mango's and in town that we didn't really need the groceries. We paid for them anyway.
Before your arrival, double-check that someone knows about your grocery order and will personally take responsibility for getting it delivered. However, you get the groceries -- from Mango's or from the local store, it's really convenient to have snacks and breakfast in your villa or even a quick dinner after a day of too much fun in the sun.
The Art of Smart Timing
Like many Caribbean islands, St. John's high season starts around mid-December and runs through mid-April. Low season runs from mid-April to mid-December.
Getting There
Arriving at the resort is not as easy as we thought it would be. Many airlines fly into St. Thomas. From there, you can take either the resort's ferry service or the ferry service that leaves from Red Hook, across the island from the airport. The drive to Red Hook from the airport can be 20 minutes if the cruise ship crowds have departed, or an hour if they have not.
We had booked the resort ferry. By the time we received our luggage it was 3:00 p.m. The woman representing Westin at the small check-in center at the St. Thomas airport told us that we could not make the 3:30 p.m. ferry because of traffic. Therefore, we would have to wait two hours for the 5:45 ferry. Despite pleading with her to ask the ferry to wait a few more minutes for us, she refused, even though the drive to Yacht Haven, where the ferry awaited, was only a 20-minute drive. After a long day of flying, we were more than a little annoyed about this delay. Had we not pre-booked the ferry, we could have taken a cab to Red Hook and from there taken a ferry into Cruz Bay and then a cab to the Westin. Our friends, traveling with simple carry-on luggage, did just that.
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