De Plane!! De Plane!!

Ever since the six months leading up to our tenth anniversary, my husband and I have been saying that we really need to do something special to commemorate the fact that for an entire decade of marriage, neither of us has succumbed to the temptation to smother the other one with a pillow while we sleep and to find out whether or not we still liked each other without the kids around.  Now that we are well past our fourteenth anniversary, we decided to make good on this threat.  The stars aligned -- both kids went to sleep away camp for two weeks, I settled a big personal injury case, so we had some spare cash, and neither of us (read: me) had made any boneheaded decisions to run for office and therefore ruin any chance of fun (or leaving the county) the family might have for about six months like we(I) did last summer.

We decided on St. Maarten.  Mike and I have always been fond of the Carribean, because we are fond of water and water sports, snorkeling and diving and swimming and the sound of the waves.  We picked St. Maarten in particular because Mike had seen a show on the History Channel, and Princess Julianna Airport in St. Maarten was featured as one of the world's most extreme airports.  (An aside: isn't Princess Juliana Airport the most romantic name for an airport?  Hartsfield-Jackson just sounds like a place where you do business.  Dulles?  Sounds like a military base.  No nonsense.  Heathrow?  Perhaps a time portal to the Victorian era, but still, you'd have to wear a corset.   Princess Julianna, on the other hand, sounds like the airport you'd use when reality had no bearing on what you were about to do.  This has turned out to be, more or less, true.)  The runway is right next to the water, and planes land right over the beach.  This wouldn't be that different from, say, LaGuardia Airport in NY, where the runway leads directly into the Atlantic Ocean, except that this particular beach is one in which you can swim.  I'm fairly certain that homeland security would have something drone-ish to say about it if you tried to swim off the runway in NYC.  We saw pictures on the History Channel of what we called crazy people hanging onto a barbed wire fence as the propulsion from jet engines threatened to blow them away like the nannies in the beginning of Mary Poppins.  Also, when the planes take off, they do so right into some mountains, so they have to pull up pretty quickly.  Surprisingly, I believe I've read they have never had a crash there.  Mike is a pilot, and also the world's oldest nine year old boy, who stops what he is doing every single time he hears an aircraft fly overhead so he can look at it and name it and offer some bit of trivia about that particular model.  So you can imagine how excited he was.  If he were a real nine year old boy, and I had told him he was going to go up with the astronauts in the next launch, he would not have been more excited.  I think he actually jumped up and down.

So we called our good friend Kathy Greenstein, whose job it is to make people's vacations happen, and she gave us some options.  We decided on the hotel right next to the airport. When I say right next to the airport, I mean that from our eight floor balcony we can see the rivets on the planes on the runway.  The planes come flying right by our window to land on a runway so close that if we were at the Atlanta Airport sitting in an airplane at the gate, we would be about three times as far from the runway.  There are plenty of small planes, but plenty of 747s and Airbuses and Mike-knows-what-else.  It was pretty cool.  The crazy fence is so close to our hotel room that you can read the word 'danger' from our balcony.  We did walk up to the fence, and watched some planes take off, but did not stand in the danger zone, because we are not that nuts.  Plus, there is a lot of sand, and while I can handle strong wind, I cannot handle jet blasted sand coming at my face.  Through a trick of acoustics, it really wasn't all that noisy, and the planes quit about 9pm and didn't pick up until about 9am.  If I can make the technology work, I will upload a video I took from the beach underneath our hotel room of one of the planes landing.  You can see my fingers in the video, and hear me complaining that I don't know if I got the shot because I couldn't see diddly-doodly because of the glare of the sun on my phone screen, but it is still pretty cool.

A few other random observations about the island: there seem to be no teenagers.  I've seen lots of small children, and lots of young adults, but only a handful of people who seem to be in the 13-18 range.  Perhaps that is why it is so peaceful here.  Also, the music is not what you would expect.  Two out of four cabdrivers were listening to old outlaw country, one waxing poetical about George Jones' recent death.  One listened to a soccer game and the other to nothing.  As background, either piped in or sang by a live band I heard in different places: Play that Funky Music (White Boy); Aretha Franklin's Respect; Bob Marley's greatest hits (with "Jammin'" and "Three Little Birds" on heavy repeat); Hall and Oates' Maneater; Escape (The Pina Colada Song); Wham!'s Careless Whisper; Gangnam Style; and three different versions of "I Can See Clearly Now The Rain Has Gone".  But not one single Jimmy Buffet song.  Go figure. 

The warning on cigarette labels here is in huge block letters taking up half the pack, and says simply, "Smoking Kills".  Despite this, there seems to be a whole lot more public smoking than I'm used to.  Although, to be fair, it seems to be only the Americans who smoke.  Also, you can spot an American from a mile away.  I'm not sure how you can know, but you can.  It got to be a game, and when we'd spot a knot of people off on the distance we'd say "American" or "Not American" and then wander over and wait for them to speak.  We were never wrong that I knew of, but I have to admit some of them might have been Canadians. 

It has been a fabulous vacation, and it will be sad to go visit Princess Julianna so she can do her bibbity bobbity boo or magic carpet thing and send us back to Hartsfield-Jackson, home of, well, home of us.  Turns out the answer to the question is yes, Mike and I do still like each other, very much, more so than we remembered.  But I guess there's only so long you can avoid the reality of every day life.  And I miss my kids.  Mostly.