St Lucia revisited - Day 1

As Sue naps from all of todays activities & before supper, I shall try to remember how, what & when so far. I suppose it starts well before our departure. When I got layed off, I had to determine what to do with my 401K. It was not enough to be more than a spit in the bucket for actual retirement, and because I was sort of involuntarily retired, and might not ever get another chance to do this magnitude of a trip again, we decided to put aside a couple months worth of mortgage money and splurge the rest on returning to wonderful St Lucia/Sandals. On one hand, being unemployed, it felt like a huge and ill-advised finacial risk. On the other hand, many couple close to us were suffering through divorces, illnesses and deaths - and to whom ever we mentioned our trip to, everybody stated "of course you should go!" To you all, I say "thanks for enabling us!"
Wednesday we arrived at Logan Airport at 3:30AM for a 5:30AM 3+ hour flight to Miami. After a 1-1/2 hour intermission there, we were on a 3+ hour flight to St Lucia. 40 minutes past San Juan, we were informed that we would about=face and land in Puerto Rico to take on more fuel and wait for the inclement weather in St Lucia to clear up a bit. Instead of landing at 1:15PM, we finally arrived at 3:30PM - "no worries, no problems". Having decided to take a 15 minute helicopter to Castries (St Lucia capital and 15 minutes to our Sandals) instead of the 1-1/2 to 2 hour taxi ride, we managed to arrive well ahead of the other plane passengers headed to the same destination. Weather was off=and=on raining, but still lovely. We settled into our room - upgraded from the one we booked as we were returning customers. Sandals was celebrating "Reunion Week" and having a special dinner for returning guests. We ate a gourmet cooked & presented meal, sharing a table with two couples from Canada (why would anybody want to own one?), a couple from Texas, and one of the Hotel Managers. We won prizes & T-shirts and had a blast exchanging stories with our new-found friends. Although the room we had been upped into was larger and did hav a balcony, we quickly determined that we truly preferred the room we had on our last visit and after thanking them for their generosity, asked if they could please "downgrade" us back to the room we originally booked. They insisted of course it would be "no problem, no pressure" and could handle it in the morning. Having just spent the last 3hours entertaining the hotel manager, Sue regailing him with stories, we felt confident that we would indeed be satisfied. We finished up early (10:00PM) and crashed on our room.