Time to bid adieu to St. Martin!  We woke up around 7:00AM, giving us plenty of time to pack up and check out.  By 9:30, we had eaten, Victoria had said good-bye to the beach and were on the road.  We had about five hours before we needed to be back at Princess Juliana International Airport for check-in.  We decided to return to the Butterfly Farm so Victoria could also say good-bye to all the butterflies.  Our visit there was shorter than originally planned, though, because of the arrival of an excursion group from a cruise ship.  So we decided to make our way around to the west side of the island to Marigot to do some last minute shopping in the French boutiques and have some lunch. 

Victoria and I dropped off Kelley and Kathie at some of the clothing shops while we continued on to Mango Mango, the restaurant whose owner had connected us with Cedric and Jean-Marie's catamarans earlier in the week.  It turns out that Mango Mango was where the locals hang out, rather than the tourists.  While Victoria sat and enjoyed our mango coladas, the locals started to come in to watch a big rugby game that was being telecast live from Paris between the French and the Welsh National teams.  Even Kathie and Kelley were getting into the game, cheering on the French team (Hey!  When in Rome, you'd better cheer for the Romans!).  We all had a perfectly yummy lunch before reluctantly returning to our car and the airport.

The flight check-in process was actually easier than we expected.  While I returned our car to Avis, Kathie, Victoria, and Kelley got all of our bags checked in and boarding passes printed out so that by the time we I returned, we were ready to get into the line-from-hell for security.  Let me say right here, that one reason to NOT take US Airways is that they are one of only a few airlines flying out of Princess Juliana International Airport that does not include the $20 exit tax in the cost of your ticket.  This means that if you're on US Airways, you'll need to wait in the check-in line, the exit tax line, AND the security line.  Not much fun.  The wait for security was not to exciting either (a little air conditioning or some fans would have been nice!), but we got through it with plenty of time to spare for our flight.  Within a few minutes of when we were scheduled to, we were boarding our flight home.

This was the point where our seven days of relaxation went out the window!  The flight was about twenty minutes late taking off, but this wasn't a huge issue given the volume of flights taking off and landing when we were leaving.  In fact, our pilot actually made up about 10 minutes during our flight to Miami International.  Then our troubles began!  On paper, we had almost two hours between our arrival at MIA and our departure for PHL.  We needed almost every single minute! 

On our landing, I noticed a second runway off to the east that was parallel with ours and a plane just about parallel with us.  The only problem was that we were twice as high as the other plane.  So when they were touching down, our pilot was revving up the engines and gaining altitude.  He said something about the runway being too short to land on in rainy conditions - I think it was because he thought it was Miami when in fact it was Fort Lauderdale!  Regardless, this brief aerial tour of South Florida cost us about ten more minutes.  When we finally did land, it took us about ten more minutes to taxi to our gate.  Following is a very brief attempt to describe why we will NEVER to an international layover in Miami again:

the walk from our gate to Immigration was the longest I have experienced in ANY international trip I've taken

while Immigration only took a couple of minutes, it took forever for our luggage to appear on the belt

to get to where you check-in for domestic connections, you need to go upstairs.  While I'm sure that there are stairs somewhere that'll get you up there, we didn't see any and had to take one of two elevators upstairs.  In general this isn't a problem, but when one of the elevators is broken and everybody getting in line to use the elevator has tons of luggage, this is a problem!

checking the luggage in for the domestic connection was a snap and took less than a minute to accomplish

you then need to go back through security for the actual flight.  This process was an emotional roller coaster.  First our hearts sank as we saw the line waiting to go through, but then we felt better when a TSA agent put us into the First Class line as our flight was coming up quick.  Then, Kelley got snagged by an over-zealous TSA agent who was convinced she was carrying contraband (i.e. scissors!) and wouldn't let us through until he had gone through every inch of her bag twice and then put her bag back through the x-ray for something that didn't exist (even the agent working the x-ray admonished him for wasting their time on something that wasn't there!).  As we had less than 20 minutes to our flight, this wasn't just frustrating, it was infuriating.

we then had to go from gate D20 all the way out to D-46 - not a brief stroll

and in the process, we needed to get some food because we had only a small package of pretzels to eat since our lunch in Marigot 8 hours before!

We finally got on board and sat down with about three minutes to spare with a sumptuous meal of egg rolls and yogurt!  The only other problem we faced was the fact that we had not had time to change our clothes in Miami and were no facing 25-degree temperatures in Philadelphia and we were clad only in shorts and shirts! 

We finally got home to Wilmington around 11:30, exhausted!  After the stress of the return flight had melted off, we all agreed that it was a fabulous, memorable trip.  We'll just make sure that next time, we'll stay on the French side, we'll make sure we ALWAYS have a bottle of Benadryl spray with us to deal with mosquito bites, we'll make DOUBLY sure that we always have enough sun lotion on, and we'll make TRIPLY sure that if we have to make a connecting flight, that the return is NOT through Miami!