This travel junkie is off to St Thomas, USVI with my girlfriends – Joanne, Carolyn, Sue and Carolyn’s daughter Talia. It’s been a very cold winter with temperatures be low freezing and record breaking lows. So I wasn’t complaining about leaving the house at 6:30 on a Saturday to head to the airport. Talia was on a separate flight from us, coming from Portland. I remembered at 5:30 this morning to remind the girls to bring their passports. Shortly after sending the text, we heard our first adventure story from T. She left her passport at the house and didn’t realize it until she got to the airport. For the Virgin Islands, you can get in without one, but you can’t leave St Thomas without one. So she drove 90 miles per hour home, picked it up, and drove back to the airport. They rushed her through security and made her flight. They closed the plane door behind her and everyone on the plane clapped. The flight attendant announced announced, The passenger who needed her passport just boarded, so now we can leave. She’s very happy with Jet Blue!!

We haven’t even arrived on the island, when we learned that Sue is also traveling to St Thomas with an expired passport. She seems calmer than I am for her. We figured, she the one of us that’s retired so maybe staying longer than a week. Carolyn mentioned that she may need to pull out the White girl distraction” technique to get through security. Carolyn distracted the first attracted African American man who checked them in outside the airport by flirting with him. So he didn’t even notice the expired passport. Then at the TSA checkpoint, Carolyn and Sue walked up to the ‘annoyed sister’ who wasn’t happy that people weren’t following her rules. She saw it was expired, and Sue played the ‘dumb blonde girl’ and said “Really, oh no how could that be, when did it expire.” But she didn’t buy it. Fortunately Sue had her drivers license so was able to get through. Sue proceeded to say, “you might need a white girl at the store toe turn something, but at the airport you need a black girl. ” We’re thinking about either having her birth certificate FedEx’d to us, or using the whichever techniques is requires at the St Thomas customs agent on our way home. Wish us luck.

We ate dinner at the hotel bar and on our way back to the room, Carolyn announced she saw a turkey in one of the trees. No one really believed her, except T, the good daughter, asked some probing questions. This led to a song, ‘Turkey in the tree, and fuck all if you don’t believe me.’ Later on we found out she meant rooster, and there are a bunch of them around our room.