What's happening in St. Thomas this week?

Before you plan anything, check how many ships are in port. Cruise ships tie up at the Havensight dock and at Crown Bay, with passengers coming ashore between 7am and 8am and returning by 4pm or 5pm. On a three-ship day, Main Street and Royal Dane Mall in Charlotte Amalie fill with jewelry-shop crowds, and the safari taxis back up along Veterans Drive in diesel fumes and honking. You cannot avoid the town on those days, so treat them as east-end beach days at Sapphire Beach or Secret Harbour instead, and leave Magens Bay until after 3pm, when the tour vans have gone back to the docks. On a day with no ships, Charlotte Amalie is a different place: that is the morning to see Fort Christian, its red walls already warm by 9am, and to climb the 99 Steps up to Blackbeard's Castle. The St. Thomas Synagogue has sand on its floor, and it feels cool and gritty under your sandals. Most of the town's sights close by mid-afternoon, so go early.

The island's social week runs east to west. From Thursday to Saturday, Red Hook on the east end is where locals and boat crews drink, with Duffy's Love Shack serving rum drinks out of an open-air shack in a parking lot and the music carrying across Route 32 until late. Frenchtown, west of Charlotte Amalie, is quieter. Fishermen sell the day's catch on the waterfront in the mornings, and the smell of salt and fish guts hangs in the air. On Sunday mornings, hymns drift out of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, and by Sunday afternoon families have taken over Magens Bay and Coki Beach with coolers, grills and soca on portable speakers. The tourists are mostly gone by then, but it is a local crowd and the beaches are still full. If a menu worries you, here is the short version. A pâté here is a crisp fried pastry filled with saltfish or spiced beef, not liver spread. Kallaloo is a thick, smoky green stew, and fungi is a firm cornmeal side, close to polenta. Johnnycakes are slightly sweet fried bread. Get them hot from the vendors near Emancipation Garden.

Autumn is the wettest stretch of the St. Thomas year, and rain usually arrives as a 20- to 30-minute afternoon downpour that hammers tin roofs before the roads steam dry again within the hour. Hurricane season covers the summer and autumn months, so watch the National Hurricane Center forecast and buy travel insurance that covers named storms. Cars drive on the left even though they are American left-hand-drive models, and first-time renters tend to drift right on the hairpins above Charlotte Amalie, so Route 30 at night is where you need to be careful. For St. John, take the ferry from Red Hook to Cruz Bay: it leaves roughly once an hour and takes around 20 minutes, and the Catherineberg Sugar Mill Ruins and the waters of the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument are within a short taxi ride of the Cruz Bay dock. The Coral World Ocean Park, next to Coki Beach, is the easy choice with kids, and TTDI rates the island 8.2/10 for families (see the TTDI Family-Friendliness Index).