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About StCroixTourism.com
My wife Dawn and I visited St.
Croix for the first time in October of 1998. We had already been to many of the
Caribbean Islands, as well as many other tropical destinations, so
it was time to give St. Croix a try. We invited my parents to
come with us and rented a villa on the North Shore near Cane Bay. One day during this fateful trip, after my Dad and I
probably had one too many Rum drinks, I sat looking out at the view
and dreamed of one day owning a home of my own on St. Croix. I told
my wife that I had been calculating....if we used all of our savings
we just might be able to buy a house on St. Croix and rent it enough
to pay the bills. She said, "That's a nice idea but I don't think
so!" The next morning, as I was sitting out on the deck nursing a
terrible headache, she came over and said, "You know, I've been
thinking, you're probably right, we could do it", to which I replied,
"Do what?" I didn't remember the previous night's conversation at all! Several months
later we were on a Caribbean Cruise with Dawn's Mom and St. Croix
was one of the ports of call. We decided to look at some real
estate...just for the fun of it. By noon that day we found Villa
Dawn, a mere shadow of what it is today, and put in an offer. The
next day we were docked on St. Thomas. We called our real estate
agent on St. Croix from a pay phone on the beach... "Did they accept our
offer?" we asked. YES! was the reply! OH...MY...GOSH! WHAT DID WE
DO! The rest is history...
We loved St. Croix so much
that decided to try and build a business on the island so that some day we might spend a whole lot more
time there and rest our
weary bones on a beautiful, warm and sunny St. Croix
beach....together!
Shortly after buying our first
property on St. Croix, we decided to create a St. Croix Tourism
website. The tourism website that the U.S. Virgin Islands Tourism
Department had online left a lot to be desired so we felt compelled to put a real
website online...one that had a wealth of St. Croix information. That
website is StCroixTourism.com. It's about all things St. Croix!!!
For the first five years of it's
existence, all of the information found on StCroixTourism.com was included entirely
free of charge. We wanted to put as
much information online as possible to promote the island we love so
much. As the years passed, the website grew larger and larger, until
it finally got to be too much work for us alone. What was once done
as a labor of love, grew into a fulltime business! We realized we
could not do this on our own and we needed some help. The only way
to fund that help was to generate income from our four websites. Of
course, we will
continue to include as much information, in every category, free of
charge. This makes us much different than other major St. Croix
websites. If you look elsewhere for information about
say...restaurants on St. Croix, all you will find are restaurants
that pay for an ad on that website. We include all St. Croix
restaurants, paid or not. The same is true for many other areas of
St. Croix information. We now have the help we need from our many St. Croix partners to keep
our
websites growing and current through their paid display ads.
While it is true that for now
we are just part-time residents on St. Croix, StCroixTourism.com, along with our partner websites, VillaDawn.com,
CaribbeanDreamVilla.com and CaribbeanBreezeCondo.com contribute
greatly to St. Croix's economy and visibility. Our three
rental properties bring hundreds of thousands of tourist dollars to
the island each year. All of the income taxes we pay, all hotel
taxes we collect (as a result of our rental properties), along with
the vast majority of the business expenses we incur, go directly to St. Croix
and the U.S. Virgin Islands!
StCtoixTourism.com is a proud member of the
and the
Dawn and I love to travel! We work
very hard...just so we can spend all of our disposable income on traveling! We
have been all over the world, but what is nearest and dearest to our
hearts are tropical destinations. Of all the places we have traveled
together, St. Croix was the place that we truly fell in love with.
We love to swim, snorkel, SCUBA dive (St. Croix has some of the best
diving anywhere), sail, eat, drink, shop, eat and drink some
more...St. Croix has it all!
We know that you will enjoy
St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands as much as we do!
Kent and Dawn Vreeland
www.StCroixTourism.com
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