What we learned last weekend

The St. Thomas airport is small. It has 11 gates, one snack bar, and one runway.  This we knew. 

The only direction that the large planes can land is from the west toward the east.  Since the runway is only 7000 feet long, a west wind above a certain speed (10 knots?) makes it dangerous  - or impossible - for the jets to land.  Apparently, this doesn't happen too often.  But, last Friday and Saturday, thanks to Hurricane Igor, the winds were blowing strongly from the west.  This is what we learned.

Why did this matter to us?

Parker was supposed to spend a long weekend with us.  She flew to Miami on Friday morning and was waiting to board her 4:30 flight to St. Thomas when she started to hear about problems with the earlier St. Thomas flight.  That flight circled for quite a while, then was diverted to Puerto Rico.  Parker's flight was eventually "delayed" until 7:45 Saturday morning.  We were all, obviously, disappointed that her visit would be shortened, but made arrangements for her to spend the night at a hotel in the Miami airport and looked forward to Saturday.

She texted us at 5:45 a.m. to let us know she hadn't slept thru her alarm and jumped into the shower.  We checked her flight status on-line - and it now showed "cancelled."  Bob got on the phone and found out that the winds were still causing problems, and Parker had been rebooked onto a Miami-St. Thomas flight on Sunday!  All of Saturday's flights were oversold, and the airline wasn't even sure that those flights would be going. 

Parker spending a day & 2 nights in Miami, then less than 24 hours here was obviously not exactly the weekend we had planned.  So, since she was already up & showered, we got her on an early flight back to Chicago, and she was there by 10:30 a.m.  What a bummer ...