St. John!

We finally made it to St. John this afternoon! We left early this morning to fly out of RDU and it was a madhouse when we arrived at the airport. I thought 2 hours would be plenty of time for a 7:30am flight out of Raleigh but I guess not. There were some seriously irate passengers at the baggage check-in line and I thought it was going to get ugly there for a minute. I'm not sure why there was such disarray at the US Airways counter. I thought it may have been because it was a Saturday morning but even though all of the other counters were busy, they were certainly not backed up like US Air. The employees were really working hard to move people along and I would really hate to have their jobs! Anyway, we made it to the gate with only a few minutes to spare before we got the call to board the plane to Charlotte. There were several Marines on our flight who were coming home from Iraq and their banter with each other was pretty funny. I think they were trying to out-embarrass one another in front of all the civilians on board. I remember one soldier with a serious Southern drawl who was heading back to Mississippi saying "Sergeant Roberts is a vegetarian and is afraid of the water. If he wasn't so pretty, his life would really stink." Maybe you had to be there but after experiencing the near potential beat-downs and profanity-laden flyers during check-in, I really appreciated the soldier's comic relief.

The flight from CLT to St. Thomas was pretty uneventful (i.e. no Dramamine issues) which is always nice. Donna read an entire book while Brian Regan's Live CD kept me pre-occupied.

We landed in St. Thomas and the open-air terminal was definitely not what I expected. I remember reading about frequent power outages on the islands and not 90 seconds after I pulled our luggage off the conveyor belt, the entire airport went black and was only being lit by the afternoon sunlight. We hopped in a taxi van and headed out for the Red Hook to St. John Ferry. Since the main route had some pretty bad congestion, our driver took the back roads. Wow! I thought I was going to hurl. He was cruising through streets only wide enough for one and a half cars and honked his horn as he turned the corners. That could seriously have passed for a theme park adventure ride and at times was not very cool. We arrived at the ferry which was also not what I was expecting. We loaded up during some intermittent rain showers and jammed onto the ferry with LOTS of other people. We finally arrived at St. John, picked up our Jeep and unloaded our gear at the condo. We tooled around the island and saw some beaches before heading to the market and coming back to cook dinner. The picture below of a very overcast sunset was our view from the balcony where we ate dinner tonight. How amazing is that view! Anyway, I'm heading off to bed so we can get an early start tomorrow. I think the roosters that live on the premises will be our wake-up call.