Tortola, BVI to the UK – 06/05/11

Mike sets the alarm for 6 am, not because we have to leave really early but because we have to pack the remainder of our stuff in the now pristinely dry and clean bow compartment.  We allow half an hour for this.  No chance.  I get in the compartment and he starts to hand stuff down – pumps, hurricane lines, genoa, gas barbecue and strange bags of stuff that we have left out of the boxes that went up to Penny’s house.  It is full when we have finished, I am dripping with sweat (lovely) and completely knackered again.  It takes an hour.  However, we are ready to leave Jeannius at 9 am and Mike drops me off at the ferry terminal while he delivers the car back to the hire company.  So far so good.

We buy our ticket, pay our departure tax (cheaper when leaving by ferry rather than by plane) and sit and wait in the ‘departure lounge’.  The 9.45 ferry leaves and we could have got on that but our tickets are for the 10 am ferry.  This leaves on time but from then on, our journey home turns into a travel nightmare of great proportion.

Half way to Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas there is an announcement that there is a problem with the engine and the ferry will instead go to St John where we will clear customs and go immediately on another ferry to Charlotte Amalie.  Minutes later we hear a really ominous knocking noise from below and the ferry slows to a crawl, so much so that at the time we should have been arriving at Charlotte Amalie we are only just getting to St John.  We all have to disembark and line up for customs and immigration.  Our luggage is at this point still being brought off the boat and when we get to the immigration officer (an officious bitch with pre-menstrual tension and a very bad case of attitude) she won’t let us go through without our luggage so we go back out, pushing through the 100 or so passengers behind us, find our bags (both naturally at the bottom of the piles) and drag it back in again to run it past the customs officer who doesn’t seem interested.

So we wait for the next ferry (which we were told would be waiting for us).  It doesn’t arrive and we start to twitch as it is now 11.30 am and our flight leaves St Thomas at 1.10 pm.  We wait.  Still nothing happens and no one knows when the ferry is coming.  The one we arrived in has now buggered off from the quay and three smaller vessels are occupying the space by the ferry dock so even if a new ferry arrived we would not be able to get on it.  Frustration starts to mount.

Eventually a group of us get together and pay a local guy to take us to St Thomas in his fast motor boat.  We all pay him $10 (giving him $110 to take us to somewhere he was going anyway!) but instead of taking us to Charlotte Amalie, just a mile from the airport, he drops us at Red Hook which is a much longer taxi ride. 

Photo:  Mike on the fast motor boat – but not fast enough unfortunately!

He calls a cab for us and it is waiting as we pull up at the dock.  Unfortunately the taxi driver is in no hurry and although I explain that we have a plane to catch in less than an hour he stops for every pedestrian crossing, lets every car out of every side roads he can find and manages to turn every traffic light on the island red.  We consequently arrive at the airport 5 minutes after the gate has shut for our flight to San Juan.

We explain that the ferry broke down but the ground crew is adamant that we cannot get on our flight even though there is still 25 minutes until its scheduled departure.  Mike wanders down to the other desks but no other airline has flights available which would get us to San Juan in time to get our British Airways connection to London so our airline puts us on standby for the next flight which will give us exactly one hour to get our luggage, check in with BA and get through security - if we can even get on it!

Mike and I are further stressed out when a phone call to BA reveals that they can’t get us on the flight the next day (in case we don’t get the standby to San Juan), and we would have to wait until Monday and pay nearly $300 each to change our tickets.  Worse still, they say if we don’t get to San Juan before the flight takes off, we will lose our tickets completely, including the return trip.  This means that getting on the standby is imperative even if we know we have little to no chance of making the BA flight.  How stupid.  Add to that the prospect of also staying in a hotel for three days and the cost of that broken down ferry just goes up and up.

Amazingly, we manage to get on the flight as standby a couple of hours later and after a hiccup with Mike's luggage (US security goes through his bag with a fine toothcomb), that makes it too.

So, we arrive at San Juan, 5 minutes late, so 55 minutes to go.  Our luggage eventually appears then we try to find the BA desk.  Now what we don’t know is that BA is handled by another airline and no one we ask knows who it is.  Mind you, finding someone who speaks English is a trial and none of them seem to have heard of BA.  We spend 20 minutes wandering around a confusing airport with bags weighing nearly 60 lbs.  Poor Mike's bag doesn’t even have wheels so he has to carry it as there’s not a trolley to be found, not even one manacled to an overcharging, opportunist porter like they are elsewhere in the Caribbean.  There are no signs which tell you which concourse you need and we don’t see any departure information screens that every other airport I have ever been to seems to have.  Eventually I find someone who says that they think American Airlines is handling BA and we retrace our steps almost to where we had started but the desk is empty.  I nearly die.  So near and yet so far.  The lady on the next desk says that there might still be some staff around and calls for a BA rep to come which she does a few minutes later.  By this time I am almost crying.  She starts to process our tickets then makes a phone call and is told that the gate is shut and they can’t let us through.  At this point I burst into tears, blubbing through our sorry little tale of travel.  She picks up the phone and gabbles away in Spanish for a while then there is a flurry of activity although we don’t realize what is going on until they take our luggage away - they have decided to re-open the gate for us.  I lean over the desk and kiss her and a guy arrives to rush us though security, taking us to the front of every queue.  Of course, sod's law dictates that I am the one picked for a random security check and have to be patted down and have my palms swabbed for explosive residue and they do the same with Mike's carry on bag.  But we get to the gate and discover that they haven’t even started boarding!!!  However, there are only 27 passengers for a 380 seat plane so this doesn’t take very long.  We stop in Antigua for an hour and that's where the plane fills up.

The amazing thing is that no one charged us for excess baggage.  We had nearly twice what we should have had on the first flight, and about 10 lbs over on the BA one.  I suppose they didn't have time!

We get a hire car home but have to stop on the way so that Mike can have a half hour sleep but make it back in one piece although getting the bloody bags up two flights of stairs is the last straw that nearly kills us.

I open the bags and look at the amount of stuff that we have had to bring home with us, all of it personal and none of it being things we don’t ‘need’.  Wherever are we going to put it all?  Victoria isn’t yet home and I start to pull some stuff out – souvenirs etc – and try to find homes for them, rearranging some of Victoria’s stuff as I go.  The before I know it, I hear a key in the lock and my baby girl flings the door open and I’m there for a hug.

World circumnavigation – done!

Homecoming – done!

Blog – done (until we return to the BVIs in July)

Bye and thank you for reading.  xxx