St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Thomas, and the B.V.I

Norwegian “Epic” Vacation

            Our first port of call was Barbados and our guide for the bus trip was Janelle, who was born and raised on the island and who was very proud of her heritage.  She made it a priority to point out the beautiful spots on Barbados, which is only 23 miles long and 14 miles wide, but Janelle couldn’t look past the fact that her island has a high cost of living and high taxes and bad roads.  Our tour included a full circumference of the island where we saw an array of unfinished houses and poverty.  On the other side of the coin, we saw St. James Church, whose origins date back to the 1600s, and Rhiana’s house on Shady Lane.  Rhiana is a native and she has donated a lot of money to the local hospital so that it could purchase medical equipment.  At the end of our tour, Janelle gave Tracey and me a big hug, something that no other tour guide has ever done, and she was such a positive person that I hugged her back because I was grateful to have a guide who had such a boisterous personality.
            On New Year’s Day, we walked around Castries, St. Lucia, because we didn’t want to take another bus trip.  Everything was closed for the holiday but there was a church service on the small island so Tracey and I went to listen to the preacher for a while.  We left the service early and made our way over to the only restaurant that was open and it was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Since we are both lifelong Kentuckians, we got a kick out of clinking our KFC glasses together in St. Lucia, an incongruous spectacle because they were paper cups and we were in the middle of the Caribbean.
            The next island on our itinerary was St. Kitts and we spent most of our time in that port milling around in Independence Square, waiting for the Carnival Parade to begin.  Since we were in the Caribbean, where time is an abstract and flexible idea, the start time for the parade kept being postponed, so we walked around the square and saw the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals.  A British couple that we ran into said that they also skipped the bus tour, preferring to “amble about.  But since we have become older our path to amble has become greatly constricted.”  We enjoyed talking to the Brits while we waited for the parade to begin but when it started to rain, we decided to cut bait and make our way back to the ship.
            Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit the Caribbean in 2017, cast a dark cloud over everything in Tortola, British Virgin Islands.  For example, the sugar factory closed because much of the building was damaged and management couldn’t find enough of the parts of the machinery to make the works run again.  We visited the botanical gardens and the lady at the front desk said, in broken English, “I lost my roof.  Everyone lost roof.  Some rebuilt.  Most did not.”  She looked so sad as she looked around the bay and pointed out all of the abandoned houses.  Tortola saw 90% destruction of all of the standing buildings by the hurricanes.  Even the botanical gardens didn’t get away unscathed; a Banyan tree had been uprooted.  These trees are very expensive and the woman said, “I can’t bear to get rid of it,” but she couldn’t afford to hire a crane to put it back in place.  The Banyan tree lay derelict and, much like the abandoned houses, will remain in place until decay turns it into an unrecognizable relic.
            Our final port of call was St. Thomas and we began our day at “Coral World Ocean Park” where Tracey got to hold a star fish, a sea urchin, and a sea cucumber at the “touching pool.”  In the aviary, a lorikeet named Pi stood on Tracey’s arm and drank nectar from a small cup that she held in her hand.  Our driver for the day was Cat, who got his nickname because his eyes were copper in color, similar to a cat’s eye.  He drove us to “Coral World” and waited for us outside of the park.  Since Tracey and I share a dream of her working for the U.S. Attorney’s office in St. Croix and us buying a condo in St. Thomas.  She could commute to work via the local ferry and my only job would be to drive her to the port at the beginning of the day and take her back home at the end of the day.  Cat drove us to a couple of condominium complexes while he told us his life story.  He has lived in St. Thomas for all of his seventy years and, when he was in college, he had a scholarship to play baseball.  Cat’s only ambition was to vacation in Puerto Rico, but he “has to find a honey” to go with him.  Just as with Janelle, Cat had a delicious Caribbean accent and all of his anecdotes were punctuated with an uproarious laugh.  He was a character.  It is always the people that you meet while on vacation, and not the places that you go, who always make the trip interesting and memorable.