Getting a Car to St John

We shipped our cars down. I know that sounds a bit crazy and likely a poor financial choice, but actually it makes the most sense when moving to St. John.

Reasoning for shipping vs. buying

Cars here are expensive and rarely in good condition. The steep hills, salt air and potholes everywhere are hard on a car. Brakes and tires need to be replaced at least yearly. The engine is always revving up the hills. Even when we sit on our porch, you constantly hear squealing around the curves and cars that struggle to get up some hills (that just happens - it isn't from erratic driving). On the first day, Oliver saw a car slide backward down a hill in the rain because the tires didn't have enough grip. Basically, mainland cars are viewed as gems when they get here because they are well-equipped to handle the roads (until they get their own wear and tear) and haven't gotten any "island-kisses" yet (such a nice word for fender benders)

Car Prep

Before we shipped our cars, we made sure to have brakes replaced, tires replaced and the engine and all parts have a good inspection to make sure they are ready. It is more affordable to fix a car on the mainland, so we made sure to get them in the best condition we could.

Transportation to St. Thomas

Oliver handled a majority of this - it is his forte. It was a logistical piece of art that started planning in July and implementation in early August. We loaded our cars onto a car

transporter at 2am in early August and shipped them down to South Carolina

The pickup was at 2am in Connecticut and drop-off 4 days later in South Carolina. There was barely any room on either side of the car.

(where we used them for our vacation there for a week). Oliver and his parents then drove them to Palm Beach and brought them to Tropical Shipping Port. (The trip luckily coincided with my sister and bro-in-law dropping off my niece at college - so he got a nice dinner with them too (jealous!) )

Tropical then shipped our cars from Florida to St Thomas and they arrived *just* before Dorian hit St Thomas as a Category 1 hurricane. We were worried about flooding, but all was OK. It took some time to get them road ready (cars have to be registered in VI to drive here). This was a huge leap of faith where we had to give all documentation and very personal information to someone here to register our cars. There were two power outages in the process that have delayed our car pickup by 1 week, but on Tuesday we were able to pick them up.

Transportation to St. John

The cars were packed an inch apart and the journey across the water was ~20minutes

The endeavor to get our car to St. John does not stop in St. Thomas! You then

need to drive the cars to a car barge that leaves every hour between 9am-7pm and get them over to St. John. We originally thought we were getting a deal - $3 a car, but, nope that is to get a spot in a parking lot to get on the barge. Then you are charged $50 roundtrip.

This barge will be something we use regularly, though - as most of the major shopping (and more affordable shopping) happens on St. Thomas.

Have I driven yet and gotten over my fear of hills?

Yes and No. I have driven on St. John (successfully) and I still have a fear of steep hills. I grew up in flat terrain - I never

This picture does not sufficiently show how steep our driveway is. I need to the car to slowly climb it in first gear.

needed gears on cars or bikes and definitely do not know how to maneuver them well on steep hills. One could say I am gear challenged. It's only the hills, though - the left side is not intimidating because have experience driving on the left from the UK & Australia. I am pretty sure I am ruining our cars engine because I am either not moving or revving the engine way too high. I thought I was going to get stuck on the driveway yesterday. I have found at that I need to use the manual gears in my automatic car - I didn't even know they existed :/

I think I need an Oliver lesson :)