The Virgin Islands are special.

Please go…and don’t take a cruise ship. Actually get your feet on the ground beyond the port and meet the people who live there full time.

Eat at restaurants off the beaten path—or ones you can only reach by boat, like the B-Line on Little Jost.

The area is beautiful and the weather, most of the time, is fabulous. But you can get great views and sunshine-filled days in lots of places. So be adventurous. Talk to the people who live there full time, eat something you cannot find on a menu at home, and show your appreciation.

This is a (rare) serious post, but please stick with me.

In every book I write, the setting is often a character–Atlantic City in Hitting the Sauce, Philly in Show Up Dead, an art store in Coffee with Vodka, and St. Thomas in Revenge Cafe. I do that because place is sacred–every place is sacred. Over the course of time, different geographical places develop unique personalities and styles. If you really get to know a place, you’ll hear its stories — sometimes whispered, sometimes yelled in your face — and you’ll learn from its wisdom.

The islands hold treasures that don’t even come close to resembling tourist trinkets. Go find it, enjoy it, and honor it.

Do be careful. Driving there isn’t for the faint of heart. Click here for proof about how scary it can be to drive there.

But it’s worth the effort. Click here for gorgeous eye candy — St. Thomas before Hurricane Maria hit in 2017.

Academic sociohistorical and linguistic researchers will tell you the language spoken in the Virgin Islands is an English creole. Other people call it a dialect. The origins of the language come from enslaved Africans who were stolen from various regions of West Africa where they spoke different languages. Unable to communicate with their European captors, they created an English-based pidgin using West African–derived words and grammatical structures. As that pidgin was passed to subsequent generations, it evolved in to what it is today.

Each island has its own dialect. There’s the Crucian dialect heard on St. Croix, the Tortolian dialect found on Tortola, etc. The Thomian dialect is what Mandy has trouble understanding when she’s in St. Thomas in Revenge Cafe. Here is a tutorial on it.

And finally, if you’d like to explore the post-colonial history of the islands , the book by Waldemar Westergaard called “The Danish West Indies Under Company Rule (1671-1754).” Westergaard discusses the discovery, imperial battles, slave rebellion, and more in a surprisingly modern tone. It was published in 1917 and is now a free-domain work. You can read it in its entirety here.