We had five minutes to get back to the ship, and we were at least ten minutes away.

I began making plans to spend at least one night in St. Maarten, while hoping that somehow one of the waves our little boat was racing over would drop us into a wormhole that ended at the pier. Then, I had an idea. “Hey, you can drop us off at that dock which is right next to the pier, right? We don’t need to go to a dock that’s a seven minute walk away, do we?”

“I can try,” the captain said.

Four minutes (which simultaneously felt like forever and also passed much faster than time typically allows) later, the closer dock was in view. It would be close, but we were going to make it. That’s when the little boat we were on veered sharply to port, and began to go toward the other dock.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“See that boat behind us?”

I turned and looked over my shoulder, aft (to use a nautical term), and saw a black Zodiac raft. On that raft were five men dressed all in black. Holding machine guns, which were also painted black. Mounted on the raft was a large machine gun. It was not black, but it was pointed right at us.

“Um…”

18 hours earlier.

Anne and I were walking down the stairs, and our friend, Jen, was coming up.

“Hey! We were hoping to run into you,” I said. “We’re chartering a little boat tomorrow, to take us over to Anguilla. We’ve done it on the last two cruises, and it was the best thing, ever. Two seats opened up. Do you and Keith want to join us?”

Before she could answer, Anne jumped in with a lot of details. “It takes about 35 minutes to get there from here, and we get to spend time on this tiny little sandy island, then we get an incredible lunch on a beautiful beach, and then we go to another little cove where we swim as long as we want. It’s so much fun and it’s so beautiful and you should totally come with us.”

Jen said that she’d need to talk with Keith, but we all knew that they would be joining us.

The next morning, 19 of us, towels and beach bags in hand, met up on the pier, right next to the ship. Our friend who was organizing the whole thing texted Anne that she (and our boat) had been run off the close pier by some goons who seemed to be taking a kickback from the cruise ships, but it wasn’t a big deal; we just needed to walk a little further than we expected.

It was about a ten minute walk to the new dock, where we all piled into a boat and got ready for our quick trip over to Anguilla. We pulled away from the dock, and motored out into the beautiful, deep blue waters of the Caribbean. We circled around St. Maarten and into a harbor that joins it to St. Martin (half the island is Dutch, and half is French, because colonialism). That’s when we found out that we’d need to make a quick stop at immigration, because we were leaving Dutch territory to go through French territory and into British territory. No big deal, we gathered up all our passports and gave them to our leader, who took them up to the immigration window for a quick inspection and stamping, before we got back on the way to our fun day of beaches and swimming and tropical funtimes.

Twenty minutes later, we were still waiting, because it turns out some of our group brought passport cards, which our State Department told them would work in the Caribbean … but this woman in immigration in the Caribbean did not get that memo and holy shit was it a whole fucking thing. Almost one incredibly tense hour later, she approved our passage to Anguilla, and we were on our way again.

Hooray! The seas are green and blue and the air is warm and the sky is clear and everything is awesome and wait a minute now we have to stop in Anguilla immigration, too, because St. Maarten called them and we get to sit there for another half hour.

Oh, and who is this guy? This guy who is walking up to the boat? He says, “I have good news and bad news.”

He gleefully waits for someone to ask him to deliver the news. Someone eventually does.

“The good news is that you can get on your way. The bad news is that there’s a departure tax of eight dollars per person.”

And that’s when I realized that we’re getting the shakedown. This whole thing has been about a shakedown, and at this point I’m so irritated by the entire fucking experience, I want to apologize to my friends who I told to expect an amazing and special day doing something wonderful, who have instead gotten to spend nearly two hours playing Bureaucracy Hero on difficulty level BULLSHIT, without knowing there were in-game purchases that it turns out are mandatory.

So I take a bunch of money out of my bag and give it to the guy. Our eyes lock and he knows that I know that this is bullshit and he knows that I know that he knows there is fuckall I can do about it.

We get on our away, again, and hours after I told my friends they’d be relaxing on a beautiful beach, we are all relaxing on a beautiful beach.

It was lovely. We swam a little bit, Keith and I had some meatballs that were so good, we named this tiny little island “Meatball Island”, and Anne said, “this makes all that immigration bullshit worth it.”

She was right.

We goofed off on this little sandy beach for about an hour or so, and then we got back into the boat and headed around the island for lunch.

Now, listen, there are a lot of great things on a JoCo Cruise, but food isn’t really in the top five. I mean, it’s okay, but it makes me wonder why the kitchen on the Freedom of the Seas hasn’t singlehandedly created a worldwide salt shortage, you know? So when we got to sit down in this restaurant and eat food that was not prepared in a fashion that would survive the Oregon Trail, it was incredible.

And there was a tiny, tropical rain shower that blew over us, ferociously dropped a bunch of rain, and then went on its way. Living, as I do, in a desert that’s in a deeply committed, long term relationship with a drought, I miss rain. So I may have run out into this warm, tropical rain shower and done a bit of a dance that was thankfully not filmed.

Because we had spent a fair amount of our day getting to our little boat, then dealing with the Immigration fiasco (I concluded that someone in the charter’s management had not paid off the right people — er, I mean, was delinquent on his taxes and fees), it was about time to get back to our ship. So we waded out into the surf, climbed into the boat, and headed back across the channel to St. Maarten.

“We have to make a quick stop at Immigration to show them that we’re returning from Anguilla,” the captain told us.

“It’s going to be really quick, right?” Our friend who organized the whole thing said. “We pull up, we drop off the manifest, and we go, right?”

“Yes,” the captain assured her.

This is where, if we were doing a movie, we’d smash cut to the boat, sitting at the dock, while the same immigration official demands our passports. Again. And we sit there for twenty minutes. Again. While I look at my watch, and do the math in my head that tells me we aren’t going to make it back to our ship on time.

But our captain is a daredevil! He gets us through the waterways of St. Martin / St. Maarten, and back around toward the port! We’re going to make it! It’s going to be close, but we’ll go to a dock that’s closer to the pier where our ship its, and we’ll be fine.

Oh, except for the heavier seas which means we can’t go as fast as we need to. And then there’s the whole thing with this boat that has a machine gun on it. That’s sort of a problem.

Which I think brings us back to where we came in:

“See that boat behind us?”

I turned and looked over my shoulder, aft (to use a nautical term), and saw a black Zodiac raft. On that raft were five men dressed all in black. Holding machine guns, which were also painted black. Mounted on the raft was a large machine gun. It was not black, but it was pointed right at us.

“Um…”

“That’s the Dutch Coast Guard, and they are dicks,” my friend said. It was like “Asps, very deadly. You go first.”

Why did it have to be machine guns?

So the boat with the machine gun was following us, probably more closely than it needed to, on account of it having a FUCKING MACHINE GUN on the bow. It was exactly was unsettling as you’d expect being followed by a boat that was training a machine gun on you would be.

I looked at my watch. It was 4:30. We were supposed to be all-aboard the ship at 4:30. As we pulled up to the dock, the machine gun boat peeled off, presumably to protect the delicate St. Maarten harbor from other nefarious tourists. Great job, guys!

The best we could do, if everything went perfectly, was get to the gangway (which I can’t write or read or say without hearing it in the voice of that creepy ventriloquist dummy from the Funhouse pinball) by 4:40. I looked at our ship, which appeared closer than it was thanks to the wonders of forced perspective. I did notice that it was still connected to the pier by a lot of ropes. Anne assured me that the ship was unlikely to leave without 19 of its passengers. I told her we would need to be very very lucky to make it.

Turns out we were lucky, because Team Scalzi was in the boat. Team Scalzi had Athena’s boyfriend, Hunter, who is young and spry and is able to run in flip flops. So Hunter leaped off the boat, hit the dock running, and flew ahead of us. He covered the distance between us and The Freedom of the Seas in record time, and the ship did not leave without us.

In spite of the whole immigration and bribe situation, it was an amazing and beautiful day. It ended up being memorable, and we even had a little bit of an adventure, there at the end.

I rewarded myself with extra ice cream after dinner that night, because I’d earned it.