Driving Tips on St. Thomas, USVI
The decision on whether to rent a car or not could make or break your trip!
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We elected to rent a car for our stay at a resort near Red Hook on Sapphire Beach. It was a privately owned villa, so there were no other options for transportation, other than taxis. After reading reviews on Expedia, I thought that it would be prudent to do so. The review that I paid attention to was that you could not walk to get groceries, so a car was necessary. It was a great decision for this trip.
But there is an important thing to note: driving here is on the left!
Yes, St. Thomas is a U. S. Territory but the cars are sourced from the U.S. The steering wheel is still on the left and you are driving on the left. My husband took on this chore, somewhat reluctantly, but I knew he could do it.
He asked me to remind him to stay left as we drove. It was an odd sensation for both of us. He needed to hug the shoulder, remembering that the left turns were tight, and the right turns were wide. For reasons I’ll disclose in another post, we ended up having part of our drive to the resort (which was on the East side of the island) in the dark. The St. Thomas airport is on the West side near the city of Charlotte Amalie.
We arrived safely and tired. The left-sided driving took some dedicated concentration — he with the road, me with the GPS, and near-constant reminders.
We did fine the next day; the grocery store would not have been walkable as the roads are narrow and curved with a lot of blind corners. Making a turn to the right was the most anxiety-producing, but we got used to it by of the week.
By Friday, we were ready to go further than the town of Red Hook. We wanted to take the ferry to St. John. Our plans did not include the car ferry. We would take the people ferry and leave our car at the parking ramp in Red Hook.
But, we didn’t get there until 10 a.m. When we pulled in, my husband drifted to the right. There was a car parked (I thought) in the left lane, and we continued around it to the right…
