The Eventful Trip Home

I have finally found time to write about our trip home from St. Lucia. At 11:30 Sunday morning we (everyone except Laura and Andy) were all placed in vans for our trip to the airport (an hour and a half drive on winding roads through the mountains). Once we arrived we had a two and a half hour wait for our plane to leave. I think almost every tourist on the island was leaving on Sunday because the airport was packed. At 3:30 we boarded our plane for the flight to Atlanta. This is where it becomes interesting.

We were supposed to arrive in Atlanta before 8:00. We thought this would give us enough time to get through customs and grab something to eat before boarding our plane to Detroit which was scheduled to leave at 9:15. That is how it was supposed to happen. Instead, we ran into quite a few problems. First, our plane was delayed in landing because of the weather. We circled Atlanta for an hour and a half. We finally landed after 8:30. While circling we learned that customs was much more involved than we originally thought. We had to go through the passport check and then claim our luggage. We then had to go through the rest of customs and recheck our luggage before heading to the gate of our connecting flight. Obviously we were stressed. But, then it got worse. We were almost through customs when Jeromy and I were stopped for the random check of luggage. It was 9:15 and we already stressed. Then, we noticed that we were the only ones from our flight stopped.

Once we finally made it through customs, we met up with my mom and she informed us that we had 15 minutes to make it to our gate. Unfortunately, the gate was in concourse B and we were in concourse E. As we ran to arrive at the gate (actually Jeromy did most of the running) we discovered that our flight was delayed until 10:15.

We finally arrived in Detroit and then drove home. Jeromy and I climbed into bed shortly before 3:00 a.m. That was definitely a long day!