Prologue

American Airlines was a nightmare. First of all, they'd called several times prior to the trip to change our flight. We had gone from flying into EIS to flying into STT, and then from flying into SJC to flying into SFO. Given that the travel plans were made as much as 6 months ago, we had no choice but to accept those changes and then complain loudly to customer service, which resulted in them giving us a measly 5000 additional frequent flyer miles! Then when we finally showed up on the airline, the promised "first class" lie-down seats didn't fold flat. (I was skeptical of the airline promise in the first place, but I looked on seatguru and at that time it seemed to indicate that I was wrong)

But our nightmare was nothing compared to what Mark Brody went through. His flight was so late that he missed his connection in San Juan and was forced to overnight in a hotel there. Arturo had suggested that he fly to STT but the morning flight and wrangling with airlines made it so that Mark was too tired to try.

We arrived safely and on time in St Thomas, and picked up the baggage with relative speed, but got to the ferry only to discover that the 3:30pm ferry had sold out! Fortunately, there was another ferry at 4:00pm (and the last ferry was at 4:30pm) so we were good.

On the ferry, we sat on the top deck to get maximum sun so we could get over the jet-lag. Arturo had arrived on time with no problems, but he'd been depending on having Mark to help him provision, and with our ferry schedule and the need to go through immigration at the ferry terminal, there was no way we would make it to the Omega before 6:00pm.

Indeed, by the time we made it to the boat (there were very few boats on the Conch slip) and moved in, we were famished and walked down to the Indian restaurant for dinner, leaving poor Arturo to provision by himself and pay the taxi driver extra to get stuff down to the boat. When we were all united, we discussed various plans to leave the dock without Mark if he became delayed again, but came to no definitive conclusion.

We were all pretty tired and so turned in early.