Sunday travels

This happened last week.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and claim that the island of Saint Vincent is greatly blessed with a grand total of three Gator graduates.  There’s a woman that sells snacks outside of the secondary school I work at that wears a gigantic Albert shirt, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know who he is — she just likes anthropomorphic alligators.  That’s fine with me because it makes me smile every week when she wears the shirt, and I tell her as much.  Anyway, we got like three strong here and in that spirit we journeyed down south to join up with Todd to watch the fotha muckin’ (Daily Show ref) SEC CHAMPIONSHIP!  From the caps you can imagine we won, but this post isn’t about that — but just for the record we spanked some Elephant ass (btw, how are Tides and Elephants related?).  This post is really about our return trip and the type of things you come to accept as perfectly normal living here.  Here’s the story:

Sundays are tough days for transportation.  We’re lucky to be on the windward side though, as the vans tend to run all the way up.  Still we wait for probably an hour or more at two different locations for a ride.  For some reason I’m less and less bothered by waiting as every day passes here.  Finally one comes and we hop in.  All seems normal until we get about 20 minutes into the trek and we’re turning around.  Houston we (need your oil) have a problem.  Apparently the driver has just paid attention to the gas gauge and we need petrol.  But since it’s Sunday, we have to pass two stations before we find an open one.  At this point we’re practically back in town.  Alright ok so now we got diesel.  Lets go.  We make it maybe two fifths of the way when we start to hear a thump thump thump.  We stop and the conductor gets out to inspect.  Our back right wheel has one loose nut.  Wait, let me rephrase that.  Our back right wheel has only one nut, which is, at the moment, loose.  He gets out and tightens it and we continue (yes I’m aware at how ridiculous the situation is, but for some reason I don’t worry about things like this anymore).  The sound returns, and we’re now going along at the clip of a winded cyclist to try and stave off the inevitable.  We decide to get off finally after realizing that our personal hell of spending 5 hours getting home in a hot cramped van is now a reality.

Now to plan B:  walking and hitching.  It’s not nearly as scary as it is in the States.  A banana truck picks us up and we see that one of the our fellow van riders has already found the truck.  He tells us that he’s on his way home too from working in the Grenadines.  The truck is reaching only to North Union, but our new friend has his own car that he leaves at his parents and he’ll be happy to give us a ride up when we reach.  Excellent.  Beautiful day to be in the back of a truck for sure and things are looking up.  I share a nice conversation with our former van-passenger.  After a while we reach to the bottom of the hill right before NU and the truck pulls over and the engine shuts off.  Three hundred yards from the next petrol station we run out of gas and now have to walk to his parent’s house.  After we meet his parents, I begin helping him load crates of empty Hairoun bottles into the back of the jeep to take to the wholesale place to switch out for full bottles for the holidays.  At the wholesale store I help him unload the empties and load the fulls.  Now on to home.  He drops us at Katie’s so we can pick up E-Lo and walk home.

A former stranger has now become a friend.  We’ve met his parents, I know what their favorite drinks are, Shannon has used their bathroom, we know his Dad’s plantain field just perished from moko, and a journey that should have taken an hour 15 has concluded just shy of 4 hours 30 minutes.  We know one more Vincy.

All in a day’s work.

I like pictures too.  Here’s one from our latest adventure which we’ll probably need to add a post about in the future and, well lets be honest we’re a little obsessed with our dog, so here’s a new one of him too.