Zublog

The Zufall experience usually comes from rolling two dice but sometimes we only need one.  We’ve used the blue (we call it letting blue decide)  when we have two options and just can’t make up our minds. We let blue decide by assigning each option either odds or evens.  Well, once in a while we use only the directional dice.

We told you about finding a hotel on St. Martin (a part of the French West Indies in the Caribbean) by chance – but the rolls didn’t stop there:   

I had heard that Anse Marcel was a nice, secluded beach that not a lot of people ended up at -perfect. When it comes to beach time, we are DIYers. So, we packed up our cooler, our towels and our umbrella and headed North.

View of Anse Marcel and Marina

The drive was very pretty, with the final stretch, up a winding road, providing a stunning preview of the little cove known as Anse Marcel. Arriving at the end of the road, we discovered free parking and plenty of signage to get you to the beach. The walkway led us straight to an area where beach chair and umbrella are for rent at $15 each. It’s smack dab in between the white loungers of the Radisson and the orangey-red of Hotel Le Domaine de Lonvilliers (jhee jhee).

We walked right past those haute chairs to the southwest side of the beach – which was wide open. It likely won’t stay that way very long based on the bulldozers ripping up the ground behind that portion of the beach. We stuck our umbrella in the ground and set up our towels…but a few minutes later a white clad waiter informed us that we were not welcome to stay. A small white plastic fence stuck in the sand was apparently the divider between public and private beach and we were in the domain of Le Domaine. A local had told us that all beaches on St. Martin are public and that regardless of how fervently a resort might try to protect its guest from having to look at riff-raff sitting directly on the sand (gasp), you had every right to stay put. But, we weren’t in the mood for putting up the good fight – we wanted to swim and chill and if that meant moving three feet to the left, so be it.

Red Stripe on the beach

Once settled, we broke out the picnic and had ourselves a nice cold beer. We frolicked in the gentle surf (the drop off is quite gradual, so it was a great location for bobbing in the water), read our books, and watched the people walking down the beach (most of whom were actually wearing bathing suits – a rare thing indeed on a French beach). 

It was the perfect last day on an island that we had truly enjoyed and thought we had fully explored.  Thanks to the dice, we found one more cove worth discovering.  And, that is why we never go on vacation without our Zufall dice.