::Day1:: Arriving and Settling In

We were so happy to be on the plane and finally going so we decided to "cheese-it" and document the vacation officially starting :)

We had a weird connecting flight and flew 20 minutes to go from DC to Philly before heading to St. Marteen.
Our first sights of land!! (I had leaned over to Joe at this point and whispered... baby!! we get to swim in that blue water! ... yeah, I was getting pretty excited)
Can you spot the sail boat?
After we landed on the island, our pilot came on and announced "Welcome to St. Marteen it's a partly cloudy but mostly sunny day here on the island... we are experiencing a glorious 86 degrees with the local time being... well, PARTY TIME!!" haha
Before we could exit the airport everyone had to go through customs. Little did Joe and I know what that would really mean. Somehow many of the flights that landed that day got scheduled to land the same time... so everyone stood in the lobby to make it through the only 4 lines for immigration that the island had. We talked to a few local guys who worked at the airport and they hadn't seen this many people before themselves so it was a surprise to everyone! This picture is of all the people in front of us and there are this many people plus some behind us. Needless to say, we were here for quite a while... but was a fun chance to meet a bunch of the other vacationers :) Plus we were on vacation so we didn't care.
We then rented our little island sized car. We didn't realize this till towards the end of the trip but because the area is so small (St Marteen is only 37 square miles) their license plates are very specific. The French side of the island had European license plates but the Dutch side had "American" looking ones. For example ours had an "R" for rented.. and we are the 862nd registered rental. (So much for trying to blend in with the locals. This pretty much screamed tourist. haha.) The locals all have a letter in place of the "R" to stand for the beach they live near and the taxis say "Taxi" and the busses say "Bus".
Our first glimpse of our resort... needless to say... we were siked!
Driving around trying to find how to get to our resort... there was horrible signage as you'll see in later posts. But we didn't mind getting lost a bit... figuring that these were our views.
Once we found out how to get into Divi Little Bay... we ventured to our room to unpack and unwind some. Now before we go looking at these pictures I must tell you that Joe and I were somehow expecting a very small room with a little "kitchen-ette" so we "WOWED" when we opened the door to a house! God is so very very kind! Our place was huge :)
Divi had a lot of stray cats around and we soon learned that they loved our porch. One morning we had 6 of them out there! oh gee...
Sigh... this picture makes me so happy and sad at the same time. I want to go back!! :) This our private padio/porch with our private lawn and private view... umm, can someone please say STUNNING!! wow. What a treat!

So this concludes Day 1. Stay tuned for Day 2 and the gorgeous sunrise that can only happen on a Caribbean Island :)