St Maarten and Anguilla were excellent again! We had only one day of rain -- the morning that we were leaving. So instead of sitting on the beach, we leisurely packed up. The beaches are in great shape. The people are still as friendly and there is more police presence than we've ever seen.

Traffic is "normal". The girls actually took the car for the first time and drove around Simpson's Bay and Maho with no trouble. The good restaurants are still good (recommendations on this site). The reviews and trip reports on TTOL are invaluable in planning excursions and eats.

BUT -- getting there and home is making it more difficult to plan for next year.

First, we live in Cleveland, but chose to save 50% air fare (USAir) by driving to/from Pittsburgh. What a pain when you land at 10:00PM and have to shuttle back to your car, load up and drive over two hours home.

Charlotte Immigration and Customs is a joke when flight 1561 lands around 7:00PM. Apparently a lot of other other international flights arrive then, too. We waited an hour to get through, as did my sister-in-law, the day before. So it wasn't a fluke. About half the booths were staffed, and other staffers were yelling at the crowd to "get up against the wall" in the hallway before we went through the cattle walk to the agents. Between rants at the crowd, the three of them just stood around gossiping about how much they hated their jobs.

After re-claiming and re-checking our bags (why?) and going through airport security again (why?) we rushed to barely make our flight to Pittsburgh.

So between the airlines with their inconvenient scheduling and voodoo fare structures and inefficient government employees and an archaic border control system, we'll probably skip SXM next year.

For those of you in major markets with direct flights, St Maarten is the place to get away from the northern Winter.

Or maybe we should just move to Charlotte!

Thanks everyone for your posts on this forum.