St. Croix - Day 2

Tiffany called the airport to find out whether our flight was cancelled and was told it was still scheduled. We checked out of the mart with Anne asking for and receiving the "Stuck-in-the-elevator discount" of ten dollars. Thumbs up, Miami Mart. I'm looking forward to our next evening together. While we were waiting for the shuttle to depart, Tiffany called home to check on her little ladies. She greeted them with an exuberant "Hi!" which our shuttle driver mistook as being directed at him. He responded with a "hello" and when Tiffany asked her girls with gusto "How are you?" the driver responded that he was fine, thank you. Then he made his way away from the bus and we all laughed.

We took the Shuttle Mart back to the Airport Mart where we intended to find a McDonald's Mart for breakfast since the Miami Mart restaurant was so incredibly priced. So we checked our bags and went through security yet again only to discover that the American Airlines terminal at Airport Mart offered the options of Au Bon Pain and Au Bon Pain as places to purchase food at stupefying prices. I think Au Bon Pain is French for "To The Great Pain." I feel confident in this assesment.

After boarding the plane to St. Croix, Anne and I watched "50 First Dates" on Tiffany's DVD player while Tiffany and Ryan probably made out or something. That reminds me of the time when Sasha drove us to the airport in SLC the day before and I will relate that story now: Anne was excited with the prospect that we would all be sitting near each other on the plane so that if we became bored with the conversation of one of us, we could merely turn to someone else and initiate a (hopefully) better conversation. Ryan referred to this as being "verbal swingers." Then we passed a sign that said "Road Closed" but the word "Road" was on a sticker that had been pasted to the sign. I wondered aloud why such a thing might have happened and the general consensus was that "Road" been misspelled on the sign originally and UDOT had created a sticker to fix it. That set me off on an imaginary dialog between the people involved in the misspelling fiasco: "You'd better order some more of those 'Road' stickers. JimBob is making signs again."

Back on the airplane, we rode it for somewhere in the vicinity of 2 hours and then arrived in St. Croix. When Tiffany called Gordon from Miami to tell him our flight information, he told her that he wouldn't be able to pick us up at the airport because the hurricane had blown trees and branches down all along the road that leads to his house on the hill. But with the use of his machete and an exceptional amount of diligence, Gordon managed to clear the road and make it to the airport to get us.

Erin models a coconut. Gordon enjoys.

He took us to the supermarket to pick up some essentials because a curfew was going into effect at 6:00 that night. The curfew was in place to prevent looting in the aftermath of the hurricane. We got a few things and then we were on our way to The Pink Fancy. The hurricane had done some damage to the hotel and there was no power. Furthermore, some kind of state of emergency had been declared and hotels were being urged to provide rooms to people displaced by the hurricane. This all added up to the four of us sharing a room. Anne and I got the air mattress.

The coconut is presented to a willing participant

The coconut makes another appearance, this time making bunny ears behind my head. Ridiculous.

Dinner that night was provided by the Pink Fancy - kind of a spontaneous pulling together of the community to take care of each other. It was lots of fun. Anne and I met Gordon's fiancée Erin for the first time. She is very nice and took great care of us. She was at the hotel helping to prepare a room for us while Gordon was getting us at the airport.

Anne does "The Robot" in fulfillment of her "Dare"

Playing cards in our shared room.

After dinner we went to our room and played Truth or Dare by gas lamp light. Playing this game as adults is somewhat not as intriguing as it was when I was a teenager. That lasted about 2 rounds and then we played cards. It was hot. I was reminded strongly of my time in the D.R. Gordon and Erin went home well after the curfew went into place. I was concerned for them because we weren't sure what would happen if they were stopped by the police. But they made it home without encountering anyone. We slept to the enchanting sound of stray roosters crowing into the warm tropical night, each successive rooster doing his best to ensure our understanding that his crow was superior to that of his predecessor.

St. Croix - Day 1

St. Croix

I went to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands with my wife and Tiffany and her husband Ryan. Gordon lives there so we decided it would be great to visit with him there and let him show us his world.

Day 1

We left on Wednesday, Oct 15. This day turned out to coincide with hurricane Omar, which passed directly over St. Croix. After checking our luggage at the airport we received a frantic phone call from Haylee. The airline had called her and told her our flights had been cancelled due to the hurricane. We told her not to worry about it since we were at the airport and would figure it out. We were surprised the woman who checked our bags hadn't mentioned anything about our flights being cancelled. At security Anne and I learned that we had been given receipts for our luggage in lieu of boarding passes so we had to go back to the ticket counter to get boarding passes. We asked her about our cancelled flights and she told us that we would be staying the night in Dallas and we'd get flights throughout the next days that would put us in St. Croix on Friday. When we got to the gate we talked to the woman there about our cancelled flights. It's all a blur now, but in essence we talked to three people at two different airports before we came up with a satisfactory solution. The side-effect of all this was that we would have to claim and re-check our baggage at all stops on our way to St. Croix. This meant going through security at each stop as well. We flew from SLC to Dallas to Miami where we would spend the night hoping the hurricane would pass. When we arrived in Miami we were given discount vouchers to spend the night at Miami Mart. Let me say that again: Miami Mart. We figured we might be spending the night in aisle 14, next to the breakfast cereals and Slurpee dispenser. To our surprise, Miami Mart turned out to be a hotel rather than a convenience store. I didn't see even a hint of a fuel pump. We checked in and began the process of enjoying the "hospitality" of $3/bottle of water, non-complimentary internet access, non-complimentary local phone calls and non-complimentary continental breakfast. The breakfast menu listed a glass of OJ at $5. In Florida. We called a local pizza joint and ordered a pizza and some Key Lime pie and a few minutes later we got a call from the lobby telling us the pizza had arrived. Anne went down to pick it up and the rest of us waited. And waited. After about 30 minutes we decided something must be wrong and where the heck was our pizza? Ryan went in search of Anne and came back a few moments later with the surprising news that Anne was stuck in the elevator.

Anne is victorious over the subjugating elevator car

I ran to the elevator to find that Anne was inside the elevator and the doors were open about 1/2 inch. She was sitting down in the elevator car and eating a piece of pizza. She told me that the staff was working on resetting the elevator, that they had tried once before and failed. A few seconds later the elevator started moving up and I thought "Oh, no. What's happening now?" Then Anne came out of another elevator. It was like magic! We went back to the room to discover that we had been given cheesecake instead of key lime pie. So we called the pizza place again and they said they would bring two pieces of key lime pie. They never did. We watched the Weather Channel for news about the hurricane which had by then been upgraded to a Category 3. Then we went to bed. Note: Queen size beds at the Miami Mart aren't really queen size. They are full.

Pancakes (Episode 3)

Written and directed by Emma