St. Maarten - Phillipsburg

We ran a few more errands this morning (marine store, groceries, picked up laundry, gassed up the dinghy) and after lunch we hopped on a jitney bus over to Phillipsburg to see what there was to do there. Phillipsburg is a huge duty-free shopping destination -- lots of cheap liquor, fancy jewelry, fine perfumes, and electronics. The place was pretty quiet, since there weren't any cruise ships in port, which suited us just fine. We had most of the shops all to ourselves. The main purpose of the trip was to find a decent underwater camera. Kevin's Canon is too nice to take underwater, and my Fujifilm won't take good photos in low light. So we made the rounds of all the electronics stores and found a camera with a watertight housing that we liked. Then of course the real work begins -- you have to bargain with these guys. The first guy quoted us a price and we said "well, we'll think about it" then he knocked $25 off and we said "no, look, really -- we have to think about it. We're going to walk around and talk it over" which of course prompted him to knock another $25 off the price. "Special price for you", he said. Sure. So we hit a couple more stores and Kevin really started getting into it. "Tell you what," he said to one guy, "you keep the carrying case and knock $25 off the price and I'll buy it right now". He drives a hard bargain. After getting all the quotes we ducked into an internet cafe to look the price up on Froogle and realized we were being quoted a slightly better price than what you'd find on the internet. And we wouldn't have to pay shipping and could use it right away. When it's in the waterproof case, the camera actually looks a little like a child's toy, but it should get the job done (can be submerged up to 130 feet) so hopefully we'll soon have some good underwater shots to post.

One other highlight (for me, at least) was that in our wanderings we passed a shop called "The Yoda Guy Gallery". Being a total star wars-ophile, I was intrigued and we had to go in to see what it was. The "Yoda Guy" is actually a guy named Nick Maley who worked on the original animatronic Yoda for the Empire Strikes Back (also on the movie "Krull" for any of you children of the early 80's). He retired from the movie business and now sells artwork alongside movie memorabilia. He happened to be in the store at the time and was very personable, giving us a nice spiel about what everything was even though it was clear that we weren't going to buy anything. Plus, he had one of the original animatronic Yoda models on display. How cool is that? Or as the Jedi Master himself would say, "Cool, it is, yes?"