Good-Bye St. Kitts

My alarm went off at 6:00 and I could tell that I was excited about the prospect of searching the beach again because I had no problem getting out of bed. I was out the door by 6:30. I decided to stop and do a nearby cache on my way to the beach. We had driven by the location several times, I just never stopped so as not to continue to torture Tom. I had always thought I would stop and do it on my own at some point. My GPS coordinates were a little off so it took a little longer then it should have to find the easy cache. Doing it this early in the morning though, was a good time to do it with nobody around.

Next stop, the beach! Traffic was no issue at this time of day and I parked in the same spot as I had the last couple of times I was here. What was different though, was that the tide was high. There was not as much treasure exposed as the waves were still coming in. I walked the beach anyway and picked up a few pieces of glass and pottery, but there were no marbles left behind at the high tide line. It was ok though because in addition to hitting the beach this morning I also wanted to do a geocache at the cruise ship port and shop for a shirt. After walking the stretch of beach I walked to the port area, took a picture at the St. Kitts sign and went to find the cache. I had previously read the logs and looked at the pictures so I knew exactly what I was looking for. It was a bison tube that was cable tied to the back of an air conditioner. I was happy to have made the find before the cruise ship passengers had disembarked. By now it was 8:00 and thankfully one of the souvenir shops was open. I browsed their selection of shirts and found one I liked. I’m glad I didn’t have to go to more than one store.

I headed back to the beach in hopes that the tide was receding and exposing more treasures. It did look like it was going down, but not enough that it left too many behind. I could see in the area where I had found the marbles yesterday, that just out into the water there was a lot of rock and glass tumbling. I decided to step in just a bit to see what I could see through the water. I’m so glad I did. I saw a marble almost right away, and then shortly after a second! I texted Tom with the update and when back to scanning the water. It felt like marbles were just magically appearing! I thought I would have to make quick grabs to get them before the wave took them back, but I learned that actually grabbing for them caused me to miss them. Letting the wave go back and then pinching at them worked much better. The marbles didn’t really move too much as they kind of got caught up in the rocks. I found my first marble at 8:30. An hour and twenty minutes later I had to go, but I found 28 total marbles!!!! I had so much fun “hunting” and plucking them out of the water. Perhaps this is what I should have been doing all along. Tom asked me if it was still special if you find 28 of them, but the answer will always be “Yes!!!”.

I got back to the hotel and quickly showered so I could pack the rest of our things and clean and sort my glass collection. I ended up bringing it all home. We had brought the Mini Doritos and Sun Chips as snacks and these cylindrical containers (like Pringle containers) worked well for my treasures. I had also brought Ziploc bags that I used. We left the hotel right on time at 11:39. After stopping to fill up the car with gas, we were at the airport a short 10 minutes later. The nice thing of being a smaller airport is that it was super easy to turn in the car (just had to drop the key in a box) and the walk was super short. Since we weren’t checking bags we went straight to security. The line did move slow, but it wasn’t terribly long. Tom was randomly selected for additional screening. It was kind of annoying that everything in the bag got moved around and that it had to be “re-packed”, but at least it wasn’t done at the gate as you were boarding. That happened to me in Turks and Caicos and it was super frustrating.

I hadn’t eaten anything yet and there was a place to get food in the tiny airport. Tom got a chicken club sandwich and I had the chicken tenders. Both were awful, and if had we known how bad it was going to be we would have rather gone hungry. The bad meal put Tom in a foul mood, reminiscent of the bad meals he had in “Hate in ’08”. We had arrived at the airport 2 hours before our flight and we felt this was probably the right amount of time. Definitely didn’t need 3 hours and we probably could have gotten away with an hour and a half. The flight was not full and we had plenty of room on the plane.

Our connection was at JFK in New York. Not having checked our bags and having Global Entry made the transition through immigration and customs a breeze. Again glad to have TSA pre-check as we had to go back through security. Tom was selected again for a more thorough search. Today was just not his day. The plane from New York to Milwaukee was pretty small. Before we boarded the gate agent had made an announcement that all the overhead bins were full, but let us go without tagging our bags to gate check them. Once we boarded I wasn’t sure where our bags were going to go. Thankfully we were sitting in the second to last row and nobody was sitting in the last row. The flight attendant said we could put our bags on the floor in the last row and she would strap them in! Awesome! The flight was fine although there were a few annoying people.

Back in Chicago we made our way from Terminal 5 to Terminal 2 to catch our shuttle back to the hotel to get our car. We couldn’t have time it any more perfect. We walked onto the street and the shuttle was waiting. We quickly made our way over and got on board. I would definitely use the Park and Stay at Loews again in the future. We were really happy with everything about that place.

We got home at 11:20p.m. Overall it felt like a long travel day, but I couldn’t have been happier with how my morning went. We enjoyed St. Kitts and would go back, however there are many other places I would want to explore and visit first.

Stats Of The Day

Steps: 11,989
Geocaches: 2/2
Marbles: 28!!!!!
Amount Of Gas Used: 3/4 Gallon
Cost To Fill Tank: $21.02