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.