Up by 5:30am and I took a peak outside. The wind was definitely picking up and it was raining off and on. I continuously checked the weather app, the weather channel online and the facebook group for St Croix to keep informed about the storm.

I always collect a small amount of sand from places I go and put it neat little bottles with the names on it to display in a curio cabinet I have at home. I hadn't collected anything on this trip. I told the hubby we should run down to the beach a grab a small sample while the kids were still sleeping and off we went.

When we arrived, there were only 2 cars in the parking lot....a little like the first day we came here. I snapped a few more pictures of the area because I'm sure I hadn't taken any the day we were here last time LOL

It was definitely a "different" feeling this time around. I had held out hope that we may be able to have a short beach day today before the storm hits and this would have been the perfect location to do it at. However, the water was not calm and the wind was blowing so hard that the sand was thrashing against our legs walking on the beach. Yea, no, it wasn't going to be a beach day either...although there was actually two people out in the water swimming while we were there. The hubby was concerned for their safety and climbed up on the life guard chair and said he was going to watch them. 😂

"Come down from there. We have things to do". We knew that we needed to find a place to vacuum out the car we rented. I was afraid of being charged a cleaning fee...so off we went to see if there was a place to do this.

We ended up stopping at the same gas station with the non-working air hose and see if maybe their vacuum worked. It started pouring down raining and that was just our luck. We waited it out because so far this morning, it was coming in spurts.

Once the rain stopped we tried out the vacuum. We were in luck! It worked...at $2 each time, I think we ended up spending probably $10 trying to get this embedded sand out of the carpet and seats. It just wasn't working the greatest at all. We did what we could and decided to give up.

We returned back to the house and Sakari was up now. I didn't even get a text asking if I had been kidnapped this time. I guess she liked it here so much that she wasn't really concerned if she had to live out the rest of her life there at this point.

I made breakfast this morning of bacon, egg and cheese on the bagels I had purchased. Then I immediately got to cleaning the house up, throwing away the trash, finishing laundry, and emptying all the milk jugs of water we had used all week when going to the beach to wash our feet off (I'm so glad I thought of that this time around because we haven't done this in the past. We would fill several jugs of water to take with us on beach days so that by the time we got back to the car we wouldn't drag as much sand in the car).

I would take breaks here and there and watch my Netflix shows and at one point I noticed some guys out on the pool deck. Where they here to clean the pool? It's not even Friday yet (their cleaning day). Why would anyone clean the pool right before a storm was about to hit? I was baffled.

However the guy had a notepad and I noticed they were looking at the roof and around the house. Hmmm. Then all of a sudden they came into the house. Like what the heck! They immediately said "Oh, we didn't realize someone was here". Like you just walk into someone's house because you thought no one was here? That left me a little disturbed. The guy gave me a card with his company and his name on it and said they were there looking at any repairs that needed to be made. Again, wouldn't this be something you do AFTER the storm?

We got to chatting and he said that they were already flying out the planes at the airport and shutting it down. When there's a storm coming, they always do this. He said that it would probably remain closed for awhile. He said flights into St Croix today had already been cancelled and they have cancelled flights for the next few days out of here. I told him we were due to leave tomorrow. He said "That's probably not going to happen". He said they were predicting that by some time tomorrow, the storm will be somewhere over Puerto Rico but even if planes could fly around the storm into St Croix, they have to be able to leave as well. So they wouldn't bring planes in that are unable to leave to take us out of here.

Notifications we were getting:

Ok, so now what do we do if we get stuck here? I messaged our Airbnb landlord and told them about the storm and what do we do if we get stuck here. Their response was "We currently have guests arriving on Thursday, August 15th so we are not able to extend your stay assuming that those guests will be able to fly.". Um...ok. Did you not understand me? I told them the airports are shut down, flights cancelled, and they have taken the planes out of here for the impending storm arriving. If we can't get out, obviously whoever is coming isn't getting in either! I was told "We can recommend The Buccaneer or King Christian Hotel which are both nearby if you want to check to see if they have availability".

We seriously went back and forth for quite some time. I was getting frustrated. They sent me a "checkout" list and that we needed to be out by 11am tomorrow. I was super frustrated at this point. They continued to ask if our flight was cancelled and if we are able to leave the island safely. I was unable to see if our flights were "officially" cancelled yet because we had to wait until the 24 hour check in time for the notification. I was just getting nowhere with this conversation and this went on for HOURS! Talk about being stressed to the max!

I told them not to worry. We would pack up and leave by their 11am check out time and just go to the airport and sleep in the car until they opened the airport back up and hope that the car rental place would extend our rental for another day. Well that FINALLY got their attention. We were told we could now stay until Thursday at 10am and didn't realize what was going on here. I kept telling them...how did they not understand?!?! They ask us to bring in the pillows, pool floats and umbrella from the pool deck and front porch as a precaution. This is not my first Tropical Storm, so we had already brought in everything that could potentially fly off already. We stacked the chairs, table and grill up against the house under the overhang.

Well at least we knew we'd have a place to stay until Thursday pending this weather. We were not going to be homeless for a few days in St Croix. Whew!

This was the path expected with possibly turning into a hurricane at this point. At first they were predicting it to hit around 5pm today or sooner.