The End of the Moon

Well folks, seeing as how we’ve been back in the rat race for 5? 6? weeks now, I guess it’s time to finish up the story of the ‘moon.  Since I’ve forgotten most of the final day, alas, it should be short.

In the morning of our final full day in sunny paradise, we decide to rent another Wrangler.  We love to drive around and just see what there is to see, and by the time we’ve navigated the sea of car-rental paperwork (this Hertz employee is a leetle more professional than the last) this is all we have time to do – see things.  No stopping allowed.  We’ve been told that Buck Island off of St. Croix is one of the hundred (or was it thousand?) places to see before you die, so we’ve signed up for an afternoon sail, and therefore have only what remains of the morning (that would be, uh, two hours by the time we’ve woken and arranged the car) to see the other St. Croix stuff.  St. Croix is a little down-and-dirtier, a little more populated and a little less affluent than its other American VI cousins.  I like it that way, although I mourn for some of the lovely unoccupied shopfronts in Frederikstad, and wish they had some tenant or other.

Anyway, we grab a map and a backpack with sunscreen and water in it, and take to the streets.  Our resort really is in a stunning place, a blue-green cove sheltered between the arms of a “mountain” with only one road out.  We wind up that road and past the uphill “Beast” road, and follow our noses to Frederikstad.  We drive through the small and quiet town, mourning, yes, mourning for the apparently sad economic state its in.  We keep going towards the Plantation Museum, which looks really interesting from the outside but costs too much for us to go in for only a few minutes, and a few minutes is all we have to spare.  Ditto the botanical gardens, and, alas, the beer drinking pigs (sorry, NJaney!!).  We head to the Cruzan Rum factory, and discover that even had we the time to see it, we would not have permission, as it is currently closed to visitors.  Oh well, at least we won’t feel bad.  We’re starving, having foregone the wretched time-devouring Saman Tree breakfast menu, and keep our eyes peeled for a McDonald’s.  We see one in a mall and stop the car, and then fiddle about with The Club for about half an hour.  If one rents a Hertz car on St. Croix, one must put The Club on one’s rental car, or if it’s stolen one will have to pay for it.  We do our best.  However, this The Club is a little difficult to work with, and it takes some experimenting before we can make it look like a convincing deterrent.  Oh, a five year old could slip it out between the spokes of the steering wheel easily, but it doesn’t LOOK that way, and that’s what counts.  We decide.

The “quick” McDonalds stop ends up taking over half an hour.  We have the great fortune to step in line behind three Kindergarten teachers who are ordering lunch for their 65 screaming students.  I know there are 65, because I count them, because we are in line long enough for me to count them.  Many times.   We try to look patient and breathe deeply as even more seconds tick off our traveling time, and try not to think of how we could have enjoyed a much better meal for the amount of time this fast food is taking.  Instead, we order our burgers and fries and orange drinks to go, with bright fake smiles, and skitter up out of the mall and back to the car, where I devour my burger while driving and spill it all over my lap and simply don’t care.

We drive from McD’s to Christiansted, which I LOVE.  Christiansted is bustling, it’s cute, it has a busy boardwalk and nightlife, it feels like a backpackers’ paradise.  We park behind the pink stucco King Christian hotel and head to the public restrooms to change into our Buck Island cruise attire – aka flip flops, bathing suits, and gobs of sunscreen.  We have just a few minutes to kill, so we stroll around the old Christiansted fort and drool over the very nice Crucian goldsmithy, where some gorgeous “Crucian Knot” jewelry wraps its fingers around my heart, then rips it out when I read the pricetag.  We step onto our small motor boat and meet our crew – a couple of VERY unhappy islanders (is this a theme?) and a perky curly-headed mainlander who spends his summers in Alaska and his winters on St. Croix and makes me wish I was brave enough to be unconventional and live such a life.  The boat is full of people, including a Finn family with the absolute most beautiful children.  I will never forget those kids’ faces.  I know I’m going all maternal here, but looking at myself and my husband one can tell that we will not be having blond spritely children – more like brown little nuts.  These kids had the most piercing Nordic blue eyes, white-blond hair, and little elf faces.  I think I freaked their mother out by staring adoringly.  Anyway, the oldest was probably four, but when we got to Buck Island she strapped on some goggles and some fins and jumped right in that water to swim with her dad, something half the adults on the boat were too scared to do.

Buck Island – well, it wouldn’t make MY list of 100 or even 1000 places to go before you die – but it was just fine.  Maybe if there were less people there we would have enjoyed it more.  I did get kicked in the face a number of times, and there were several gasping tourists who’d never snorkeled before and waited til they were in the middle of the open water, ages from the boat, before they would admit they were afraid of it.  The Professor and I had to hold hands to keep together in the sea of people.  But it was neat enough, and when I held my breath and dove down deep away from the nexus of legs and fins and screaming children, it was quite peaceful and magical.  The second half of our trip was spent walking on the beach, and we took a short walk with one of our grumpy guides to a less crowded elbow of the island where sting rays and small sharks swam.  We shark spotted for twenty minutes, and I tried to catch a picture of a pelican diving headfirst into the sea because it was SO FUNNY, but the camera ran out of battery.  So instead we picked our barefooted way through a forest path, past an enormous termite hill and dozens of drooping vines, and back onto the main beach, where they were already blowing the conch shell to let us know it was time to re-board the ship for the mainland.  Some girls on some kind of trip ran up to the Professor and asked him where a good place was to get laid, and he blinked at them for a minute before telling them he was on his honeymoon and didn’t know.  I smiled, and they squealed at each other and raced back into the water, saying “Sorry!  We’re just damn teenagers!”  I laughed at their silliness, envied it a little (um, did I go to St. Croix as a teenager?  No.  That would be a no.)  We hopped back on the boat and headed back to town, where we had dinner on the boardwalk at an outdoor restaurant.  A completely wretched child ruined our meal (In my sleep I still sometimes hear a four year old screechy voice demanding “Mama.  Mama LISTEN TO ME RIGHT NOW.”  and Mama saying “Now Christian, please put down that steak knife.  Please don’t hold that steak knife to Papa’s neck, little sweetheart, Mama wants you to please put that knife down my darling.”  I am not exaggerating.  The approximately four year old child in the seat behind me had a SHARP KNIFE, and his “Mama” did not feel it was necessary to wrest it from his little hands and break his every finger.)  So we raced through our food and strolled back to our car, and made our leisurely way back to Carambola for our final night.

When we arrived, some sort of slightly scary dance thing was going on.  There were tall people on stilts and in costumes dancing in the restaurant, and literally hundreds of specatators crowded everywhere, going up to the stilt-people and handing them money, like in a strip club or something.  The Professor and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, not in the mood after the knife-wielding toddler debacle, and went to bed, where we could still hear the festivities going til after midnight.  As we had to wake up before five in the morning to catch our ferry, we were not pleased.  To add to our pleasure, a father and son in the room below us decided to have a screaming match beneath our window throughout the late evening.  When our alarm went off before five we were tempted to give them a little noisy noise to get even, but decided not to let our grumps about leaving paradise make us completely evil to other people.  Just each other.

The Professor dropped me off at the ferry in the Wrangler, and then dropped it off and walked to me.  We caught the ferry to St. Thomas and then took a taxi to the airport, where we planned to check our bags and spend the rest of the day exploring St. Thomas (we were there at 8am, and our flight didn’t leave until 4:45 pm).  Oh no.  Silly us.  St. Thomas airport doesn’t let you CHECK your bags,  you  must keep them with you at all times until you pass the security checkpoint, and once passing through those doors of no return you can’t, well, return.

What.

We planned this whole scheme out so we could spend our last day exploring St. Thomas.  We got up BEFORE FIVE AM so we could explore St. Thomas.  But there was no freaking way we could explore St. Thomas with our suitcase.  It was too unwieldy, too heavy, especially laden down with gifts and rum.

So instead of exploring St. Thomas, we dragged our baggage across the street to a park and sat there for about six hours.  We could see all the sunbathing people across the bay from us enjoying their Saturdays, we even saw a wedding on the beach, but we were tethered to our wretched bags, stuck in that wretched park, with no food or water or anything to do.  The last day of our fricking vacation and we were stuck.  It took all our willpower not to let it ruin the whole trip.  Anyway, at about 2pm we decided to head back on over to the airport, and it’s a good thing we did because the line through customs was about a mile long, and that is not an exaggeration.  It stretched the whole length of the airport.  Once through customs, we went to the overheated, overcrowded terminal, where we waited another hour and a half.  Finally, they called our flight, and we handed in our boarding passes and boarded the plane.

A few minutes later, a couple approached us.  Their boarding passes showed the same seat.  We stayed firmly planted, but after checking with the flight attendants we discovered that the seats were theirs.  We were asked to LEAVE the aircraft.  Checking with the lady at the terminal, we discovered that we had called and changed our tickets to leave on Wednesday, not Saturday, and that is what we were currently booked for.

What.

6 hours in the park, 2 hours in line and an hour and a half in that stuffy terminal, and they were telling us we’d have to do it all again in four days, and meanwhile pay for ourselves to stay four more days!!

Long story longer, it turns out that on that particular Saturday Crappy US Air had merged computer systems with Crappy America West, and it ended up double booking and screwing up lots of people’s air reservations.  There were no hotels available in the area that night because so many people were in trouble, so it’s a good thing that we got on the plane in the end.  Oh, we had to stand at the terminal counter for another hour where my husband quietly had a coronary and I started mentally calculating the cost of staying four more days, and also losing all those vacation days at work.  I think the girl finally believed that we hadn’t called the airline between 8am and 4pm to change our reservation for our honeymoon we’d planned six months in advance, when she told us that she could get us as far as Charlotte NC but we would miss our connection, and we explained that Charlotte was our end destination.  She said “Charlotte is your terminus?”  We said, “Yes, yes of course it is, it always was,” and she frowned at her computer, typed for about half an hour, called a million people, and let us on.  We took the last two seats on the plane, totally separate from one another, but at least we were on.

And thus ended our honeymoon.  Like I said, it was a real shame it had to begin and end in that horrid airport.  But on the bright side, we were met in Charlotte by the Professor’s sister Erin and her husband Clif, and they took us out for St. Patrick’s day on the town.  It was cold up here in NC, and late, and we were tired, but we found our second wind and enjoyed a couple of Harps on the town.

It was a great ‘moon.  Lucky us, we got both a mini ‘moon and a big ‘moon.  Not many people get to enjoy TWO honeymoons!  And now you’ve gotten to enjoy them, too.  If you’ve read this far . . . thanks for sticking with it!