The Atrium hotel was quite a bit nicer than I expected, and since the hotel was right at Buccaneer’s Beach Bar I went there for dinner, and since my back was hurting I wasn’t going to much further than the 100 steps from hotel entrance to beach bar.
In the morning I walked (slowly, since that cramped seat on the short hop to St. Martin had evidently not done my back much good) to the St. Martin Yacht club for a coffee and breakfast and could see the damage done to the bridge house by the mega yacht ECSTASEA firsthand. There’s a video at youtube video and I’m really surprised that the bridge tender didn’t get hurt.
After breakfast I hung around the hotel room until it was time to catch my flight, Air France from SXM to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, from there to Schiphol outside Amsterdam and from there to Nürnberg. I was all the way in the back and man, that seat was small and uncomfortable. While we were delayed a bit coming in to CDG I could just make my connecting flight but, as can almost be expected, my luggage didn’t.
I made my lost baggage declaration upon arrival in Nürnberg and they said they would deliver it in a day or two. I took a long train drive towards my destination and upon arrival realized that I’d put my keys and phone into the luggage (so I wouldn’t need to carry anything onboard) and as luck would have it my landlords, who live in the same house, had gone on a trip that weekend! Luckily there was another contract in town and I managed to get the place opened up and barely stayed awake all day before crashing for a very long night sleep; but that helped get over jet lag.
Final Update
On the Monday after my return I opted to visit a local orthopaedic clinic as my back wasn’t feeling good after all those hours hunched over in small seats on various flights. I was examined in a similar fashion to what I’d experienced in the BVI and the wasn’t impressed by my lack of mobility or wincing when she tried to bend me this way and that. But her diagnosis was the same as that in the BVI but she had me take some X-Rays anyway.
When I returned to the consulting room she was somewhat shaken and it turns out that I had 2 badly broken vertebrae with compressed discs, another hairline fracture and a possible fourth fracture – that wasn’t fully visible on the X-Ray and I wasn’t going to let myself get zapped again since it didn’t make any difference to the outcome. She said that normally she would have to send me to the clinic where I’d get put into traction for a couple of weeks – but since I’d somehow survived the first 3 weeks after the accident without permanently damaging myself or getting paralyzed she could imagine that the next 3 to 4 weeks of healing could be done on my own cognizance! I got a lumbar brace (kind of like a corset and for the first time in many years I’ve now got a flat stomach) and was admonished to be very, very careful. I was going to miss my games of Twister for a while…
