• No sleep on our wedding night – we left the reception around 11 PM, and the plane left the next morning at 6 AM.
  • When we landed in St. Maarten, we found that the new Airport is due to be completed in 3 weeks. I can only hope that it has air conditioning – the old airport did not, which made the hours-long customs wait very tedious.

  • Grand Case is a beautiful french village as of yet relatively unspoiled by its tourists potential. There’s nary a chain restaurant on the entire French half of the island. Every restaurant is capable of culinary masterpieces. They are also quite pricey. As in, pricey enough that our honeymoon may have significantly delayed any fleeting notion of getting a new house.
  • It was absolutely beautiful, almost every day. However, we were there in the ‘down season’, which is a fancy way of saying the ‘rain season – oh, and maybe hurricanes’. We got rain every morning. Sunshine almost every afternoon.
  • Unfortunately, the rain every morning made it impossible for us to take any charter boat trips. Apparently, those decisions were made every morning before 9, and the sun was almost always out by 10:30. As such, we spent almost our entire honeymoon on the beach, reading and/or swimming. This frustrated Sara to no end, but to be honest, it’s pretty close to my ideal vacation.
  • St. Maarten marks my first attempt to ever rent a car and drive in a foreign country. I found it oddly terrifying, especially given that way too many of the roads were tiny, one-lane mountain roads with hairpin turns. Also, the dutch may believe in building great dikes, but their island roads are built to flood like a canal. We often would park our pocket-sized Eurocar on the side of the road and wait for an SUV to prove that the puddle in the road had a bottom.
  • Among notable sights, we saw the fattest cat I’ve ever seen, what appeared to be a waterspout, and a drunken old island man dancing and appearing to hit on everything that moves.
  • Grand case is a tiny village, and there are no taxis on the island late at night which cut out our carousing options on the island, as the village was too small to have any nightlife to speak of. We actually ended up falling asleep while watching the baseball playoffs after our extremely expensive but appropriately wonderful meals. Side note: everyone on the island seemed bummed that the Yankees were out of the playoffs. Of course, I personally saw that fact as an early wedding gift.
  • The Delta trip back home was a unique brand of annoying. We almost missed our connection flight because they couldn’t figure out where to park the plane so they could connect the gate. The pilot spent an hour dealing with this problem, which really seemed like it should have been taught on day one of Commercial Flight School.

We’re back safe and sound now, so you should start seeing more updates from me. I will say the vacation seems to have done me well – I’m feeling rested and recharged, and really enjoying getting back into the work I was doing.