As it is with most things in life, we often remember the last thing that happened to us on a trip, especially if it’s bad. As the title of this post states, I am determined to not let that happen with our recent trip to St. Martin. So let’s get it out of the way – what happened on the way home?
Well, upon arrival at the airport for our flight home we found out our return flight was preemptively canceled by Delta (claiming weather, of course) the previous day. After working our way through the line we were booked on to a Continental flight through Newark the following day.
Once we knew we were stuck on the island for the night the helpful people at the tourism desk were able to put me in touch with Fawnette at Azure Beach Studios, one of the alternate places we had investigated, who fortunately had a room available for the night.
Upon arrival to our room, we flipped on the TV to see what all the fuss was about and nearly cried when we saw that the storms that were messing with Atlanta were heading straight for New York… the new destination the Delta agents had just booked us on for next day. We reacted to this news by changing into our bathing suits, heading to a local market to buy some beer, and trying to relax on the beach, carefully rationing the small amount of suntan lotion we had left.
The next day we headed back to the airport, three hours before our flight, to discover that the new flight we were booked on was unsurprisingly canceled (again) and Continental had rebooked us on a flight for Wednesday. TWO DAYS LATER!
So we smiled, thanked them kindly, and marched back to Delta to convince them to put us on the flight to Atlanta where we could at least standby for an RDU flight. Five hours later, we were in the air to Atlanta. After clearing customs we waited till about 1am for our delayed standby flight that finally got us home at 2:30am. All told, a good 28 hours later than originally planned, with about 16 hours spent in the airport.
Whew.
Thankfully, we really did had a lovely time on St. Martin, driving from beach to beach, enjoying French wine and cheese on our patio overlooking the Caribbean Sea, and sampling several restaurants that were always outdoors.
So, I’ll leave you with this photo… photos and a full trip report will follow soon!
