This is a quote borrowed from Emma Staub’s The Vacationers, but it is the perfect table setting on which to commence the leisure feast that is St. Barthelemy. Long relegated to a list of places I had no particular desire to see (gaudy table-dancing celebs who traipsed aimlessly from megayacht to mansion rental under the watchful eye of gawking wannabes? This Angeleno has had her fill of that scene, thankyouverymuch.) Like most things though, there was unmined mettle beneath the noise. St. Barth is, in fact, a magical Parisian paradise, an impossible old European reverie folded into narrow shelves of oceanside cliff. Accessed by slender, criss-crossing roads via tiny tin can cars, its otherness is made infinitely better by the delightful fact that such a place exists in reality.

Mosquitos tend to devour foreigners, and it is eyebrow-raisingly expensive, it’s true. (Maybe the only downside to recovering heaven on Earth is that it still accepts American Express). But it offers what has become elusive in our overconnected, hyper-stressed modern day existence: transcendent disappearance, the gleeful abandonment of one’s aforementioned ‘yoke’; that blessed burden we call day-to-day that requires intermittent molting in order to remain passably sane. It is occasional speedboats dotting a cottonwood wake through the shimmering turquoise, reclining in lullaby waves, eclectic morsels and simple wines. It is a recalibration of both atoms and attitude at a time when it will be deeply welcomed. It is one of those places you know you’ll ache to revisit when you’ve only just arrived. In short, it’s everything ‘getting away’ should aspire to be.

With love from the Isle,
Katie