My Islands Online

This was the 6th trip to St. Maarten for Meddie and I, not including the many trips we took from  Anguilla while living on the island for 6 months.  We were a little hestitant in taking this trip as we left Anguilla in March with some ill feelings. 

 In any event it turned out to be a quite nice trip.  On the way home I decided that in the future we will stay either at The Royal Islander LaPlage, The Grand Case Beach Club, or in a nice villa in Terres Basses.  I no longer enjoy driving around the island.  The traffic is just too much!  Staying at the Royal Islander would be the choice for a week of relaxing by the pool and visiting with our friends while enjoying some good food.  The Grand Case Beach Club would allow us to enjoy the great foot found in Grand Case as well as a quick trip to Orient Beach.

Airport and Flights

We were able to take advantage of our American Airlines frequent flyer mile this time but it took a bit doing.  We flew from Portland (PDX) to Chicago (ORD) in the afternoon and the following morning caught a flight to San Juan (SJU).  The final leg brought us into St. Maarten (SXM) in the afternoon.  All the flights were pretty uneventfull.   We were able to have a nice dinner in Chicago (Rosemont) at Harry Carry's.  That was pretty enjoyable and it was real nice to break our normally long flight to St. Maarten by spending the night in Chicago.  While our room at the Hampton was nothing to shout about it was a decent bed!

The return flights were pretty good also.  We flew out of St. Maarten in the morning and went through the customs and immigration routine in San Juan.  After a couple of hours in San Juan we caught our next flight to Chicago.  Arriving in the early evening and catching the shuttle to the Double Tree in Rosemont.  The biggest problem we had was getting from the baggage claim area to the shuttle area in Chicago at O'hare.  The signs are worthless and the shuttle schedule isn't much better.

Accomodations

The first eight nights we stayed at the Sapphire in the Cuppecoy area.  The Sappire is not one of our favorite places to stay, but we were able to use some of our Hilton Grand Vacations Club points so the room ended up being pretty cheep.  The only bad part was that we orininally planned on staying just three nights there before moving on to the Royal Islander.  However, because of having difficulty in getting the frequent flyer seats on the flights we wanted we "had" to add 5 additional nights to our trip.  What this meant (other than having 6 more wonderfull days in paradise) was that we had to change rooms after 3 nights at the Sapphire.

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