Friday morning after breakfast and long goodbyes to the few remaining couples, we headed back to the tiny airport at Charlotte Amalie. We were tired, hung over, bloated and flea bitten. Just the way you should end a holiday :-)

We got the airport about 1pm ready for our 3pm flight out of there. I was dreading this bit as I’d left it to the last minute to renew my British passport and got all freaked out about it, but as it happened immigration didn’t even look at it, all they needed to do was swipe my green card and I was good to go. Sally unfortunately had left a bottle of water in her backpack which the x-ray scanners freaked out about and they had to strip her bag twice before realizing the machine was freaking out over just a bottle of water.

Then we waited for hours in the tiny airport with not enough seating for all the out-going passengers. We sat on the floor, leaning against a window. At least we could see the ocean and some other islands in the distance.

The first flight was long but problem free until we got to our old nemesis, Philly. The problem this time was visibility. We couldn’t see anything until we were almost on the ground, so the plane had to circle for 45 minutes waiting for other slowed up planes to land. This meant we had just 15 minutes to get from the very end of the international terminal (gate A23) across to the domestic terminal (gate B11). And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I was wearing flip-flops so my leg muscles were burning after a couple of minutes running through the airport. In retrospect I should have just taken the flip-flops off and gone bare-foot, but I wasn’t that intelligent at the time.

Somehow we made it to gate B11 just as the final passengers were boarding and we made it onto the plane. You can imagine how pissed we were then, when we roll out to the edge of the runway and the sit there for an hour waiting for the departure gate to give the pilot the codes he needs to take-off - grrrrrr! If they’d just delayed the plane an hour at the gate, I wouldn’t still have shin-splints!!! On the plus side, Sally got chatting to this guy sat next to us and it turned out he was the chief architect at a software company. Within 10 minutes he was giving me his business card and telling me to email him about a job :-) Life’s funny like that isn’t it?

The other sucky thing was on both flights, they ran out of food before they got to us at the back of the plane - great planning guys. So by the time we hit Phoenix, it was midnight and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Luckily it was a friday night, and Phoenix is a bit of a 24 hour town, so we hit a brand new McDonalds on the way home (yeah, I know, but we were desperate. It was that or Mo’s cat-food). Even this got lively as there was a guy in front of us who had walked up to the drive through window, but they wont serve walk-ups, so we ended up getting his food for him, and getting his change in quarters so he could do his washing! Jeez! By the time we got home we just wanted to collapse, so we scarfed our Mickey D’s and gave Mo some much needed petting. Our friend Jodi had looked in on her while we were away - thanks Jodi! - but Mo still needed some good scratching under the chin before she’d calm down for the night.

And then we slept, for a very, very long time...

Sally here. STT to PHX: It was crap just like Ross said.