We arrived at 7 AM, but were not the first ship docked; by the end of the day, there were three other (larger) cruise ships docked; we guesstimated about 7,500 tourists could have been ashore.
Our final plan for Philipsburg was to walk through town and see some local artist murals, spend some time in the sun at the town beach, and to head out to Maho Beach where you can see planes close overhead that are headed to land at the airport.
We'd decided to test ourselves for Covid before going ashore, and were both negative. I was exhausted, however, from lack of sleep- the first two nights featured loud mechanical/metallic sounds of varying frequency and intensity that kept waking me up. In the course of the third day at sea we spoke with a couple who suggested we rally *should* register a complaint about it, so we did. The night before arriving in Sint Maarten it had gone away. We'll probably never know what caused it, but that was the end of it.
Our mural hunt netted us most of the murals and a nice look about the town, which has seen better days. Of course, in 2017 it was badly damaged by Hurricane Irma and has suffered several other hurricane strikes since. Our beach time was pleasant; we'd gotten two chairs, an umbrella, and four beers for $25.00. We crashed out till about noon, then I went back to Queen Victoria for a deeper sleep and Phil went out to Maho Beach.
Maho Beach is known as a "must do". The beach is at the foot of the runway, so it looks like the arriving planes are just feet over the beach. Actually, I was disappointed. I think the planes are actually closer just outside of Fort Mifflin, at the Philadelphia airport. I stayed long enough to watch two planes land and headed back to the boat.
At 5:30 PM, the ship pushed off and headed to Aruba.
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