Biras Creek

Bear's 50th Birthday Trip to the Virgin Islands

Back in late 2002 I started thinking about what I'd like to do to celebrate my 50th birthday in 2003. I thought a nice vacation would be the ticket, and went to the library to get some travel guides. One book on the Caribbean islands had a quiz you could take to find the island most suitable for your vacation needs. This quiz pointed me to the British Virgin Islands (I must admit I'd never heard of them before). Going to the BVI section of the book I started looking at potential resorts. One stood out above the rest - Biras Creek (pronounced Buy-ras, not Beer-as), located in a secluded area on the island of Virgin Gorda. It met all my criteria for my birthday trip: warm location, a place I'd never been before, secluded, on the water, and with activities available that I'd never done before. An added bonus was that they allow no more than 60 guests there at any one time, so I knew it would be nice and private. For the next several months I continued to search for a place that sounded better, but I never found one, so I made reservations for a week surrounding my birthday in early December. My plans had us flying to St. Thomas, USVI on Thanksgiving Day, spending the night there, taking the ferry to the BVIs the next day, then spending 7 nights at Biras Creek.

St. Thomas

We decided to fly out of Charlotte, as US Air had a non-stop flight to St Thomas, USVI. Charlotte is normally only a 2 hour drive for us, but since we were heading down there on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, it ended up taking over 3 hours due to the very heavy traffic. We arrived at our destination for the night - the Holiday Inn Express located just west of the airport - at about 4PM. We ate a a local Subway shop, and went to bed early so we'd be well rested for the trip tomorrow. Thursday morning we had a nice breakfast at the hotel, then we headed over to the airport. We had to park in the overflow lot, as all the other lots were full. This turned out to be a break, as they had a special deal where you paid a flat $10 for the whole time you were parked there. After taking the shuttle van to the terminal, we went through security and then sat around for a good hour and a half until our flight left at 10:30AM. It was cloudy and in the 40's when we left. After an uneventful 3-1/2 hour flight, we landed in St. Thomas. It was sunny and in the low 80's. We got our luggage and took a taxi van to the Holiday Inn on the harbor in west Charlotte Amalie. The reason we choose this hotel was that it was located right across the street from the ferry dock, and since we were taking the ferry to the BVIs, it was extremely convenient. The Holiday Inn was very nice and had a great view of the harbor, where many cruise ships were docked.