Troll Echos

Once loaded up onto the bus to Sandals Regency we were off for what I could only describe as an, uh, “exciting” trip.  A bus on St. Lucia is more like a large mini-van with extra seats crammed into it.  Before I can explain how the trip to the resort was, I need to explain a couple of things about the island itself.

St. Lucia is a volcanic island formed almost entirely by a single large volcano near its center but offset slightly toward the southern end of the island.  Due to either volcanic chance or perhaps erosion patterns the island’s mountains have an almost starfish like quality.  There is a large set of peaks with many very steep ridges and valleys radiating outward toward the sea.  Because of these ridges, the obvious approach to road construction was to simply try to go around.  For this reason almost all of the cities on the island are near the ocean and there is effectively one large road that goes all the way around the island.  Before the concept of a road that “goes around a mountain” gels up too solidly in your head, think back to the humble starfish. Imagine one with not five but closer to twenty legs.  Then instead of radiating out in equidistant straight lines make it more like a tangled twisty mess as would be drawn by a child with a mountain colored crayon.

Now try to imagine the road that would be forced to go up and down this crazy freak of a starfish to avoid sending its traffic out into the ocean.  That, my friends, is the road that we had to take from the airport at the very bottom of the island to the resort at the very top.  As the crow flies, the island cities we were traveling between are no more than twenty miles apart, but the drive clocked in at almost exactly an hour of crazy turns and hills. Beyond geological concerns, the driver in a car sits on the right side of the car, drives on the left side of the road, and enjoys an almost complete lack of traffic laws beyond that.

As far as I managed to learn from the times when I had my eyes open during the drive, there are generally no speed limits on the island unless you are near cities.  The general idea is, “get there as fast as you possibly can without flying off a mountain or crashing into anything.”  Also, since some folk like to try for land speed records and others seem to drive vehicles without engines that have greater than six horsepower, passing each other isn’t just something you occasionally do, it’s actually part of driving anywhere and happens all the time.  To make that slightly more exciting than it would otherwise be, remember that there is basically one road.  Now put an entire island worth of traffic onto it.  See what I mean yet?

If that wasn’t enough, it rains for almost six months straight every year and is dry for the other six.  The effect that has on roads may not be immediately obvious, so let me explain how it goes well beyond wet slippery roads.  The entire island was constructed with drainage ditches to try to keep things like cars and people and bananas from washing away.  These ditches can be found almost everywhere and are usually around two to three feet deep and about one to one and a half feet across.  Roads are the most common thing that has them and for that pattern to work, there are a few things that have to go.  Shoulders are likely considered a waste of space and a curb on the side of the road would only mess up how the drainage ditches work, things like guard rails to keep your van on the road in case something bad happened are clearly a concept for the weak.  This gives our speed racer inspired traffic acrobats less room to maneuver and a very easy to fall into ditch to wreck a wheel or a whole car in or as one’s imagination is spinning tales, off of the road, down a cliff, off of a banana tree or twelve and then right into the ocean off the cliffs at the bottom.

There are huge long stretches that have no lines on the road at all to assist the effort of staying on them. The general up and down and hyper-twisty nature of the roads regularly means you see traffic coming at 90 degree angles that you would assume is someone merging into the road, but is in fact just traffic moving in its own lane opposite yours.  People of all shapes and sizes walk on the sides of these streets both near cities and out in villages near the banana trees.  To the crazier types out there it could be considered sport driving in the same way a guy with a gun in the woods could be considered a sport.  I often wondered if we were going to be in the bus that took out the entire 4th grade class from a smaller village on the way.  After an hour of this, you are truly ready to be at your destination, and are also comically kind of used to it.  It was good to be at our resort finally.

Ok, to those of you that were paying attention, I know I said this wasn’t going to be like a diary, but for this post, it kinda will.  How else is one supposed to tell the story of international travel?

Our morning started at the brutally early time of 2am.  Our flight was going to leave JFK airport at 5:45am whether we were there or not, so it really made a lot of sense to be there.  We had packed over the previous week and had remarkably little to do on the morning of our departure.  After a drive to the airport provided by my father-in-law we started our adventure by getting grumbled at by a mean lady with a power complex and a dashing red coat.  “You’re late.  The flight closes in 15 minutes.”  To which I immediately thought, “How late am I really if the flight doesn’t close for another 15 minutes?”  For obvious reasons I left that thought safely in my head.

After a brief time in a line to check our bags we found that being “late” of course still means that we were left to sit around waiting for anything exciting to happen at the gate.  We had time to grab a muffin for breakfast from the Au Bon Pan near the gate, use the facilities, and still sat around after eating.  Our flight left on time.

To avoid turning this into a diary, I’ll jump ahead to when our flight was descending toward Miami International Airport.  The flight attendant began to ramble off a list of connecting international destinations and the gates we would have to wander off to in order to go to those places.  We heard St. Lucia in the list, heard her say gate 51, confirmed it with each other, and even took out the American Airlines magazine with the airport maps in it and figured out how we would get to that gate.  Once in the Miami airport we walked to the departures board, confirmed the time of our flight and somehow entirely failed to verify the gate number before wandering off to gate 51.

On our way to the gate we hit up another restaurant for a pre-made turkey and cheese sandwich to split so we wouldn’t starve to death on the longer leg of our travels to St. Lucia.  Then we made our way to a semi-crowded gate area that had additional people showing up from time to time.  We ate our lunch and assumed all was well.  The time we were expecting to start boarding came and went and my wife decided to go for a last minute pit stop before they started.  That’s when it soaked in.

The board at the gate we were told to sit at was not international at all.  It was to Chicago.  That flight was leaving 10 minutes later than ours and that was why they hadn’t started boarding yet, but still had people arriving to the gate area.  My heart started pounding as I tried to figure out how to get us where we needed to be in the now very limited time I had to get us there.  I grabbed my wife’s hand and took off at a power-walk pace to the nearest departure board.  That board said gate 34.

Now for those of you that are taking notes, gate 51 is not the same as gate 34.  We had been blatantly misinformed and at our own fault failed entirely to verify our information until it was almost too late.  With this new information and signs over our heads telling us that gates 40 through 31 are this way, we resumed our morning power-walking session.  Somehow, we missed it.  My wife and I are both reasonably smart people and when a sign says gates 40 through 31 are this way, we figure that is exactly what we would find.  Yet there was no 34.  We hit the area where 31 was, hit a bend in the corridor and started seeing signs for other sections of the airport.

This was not a good time to have misleading airport signs.  Using the closest aproximation of my previously mentioned intelligence that I could muster considering the situation, I flagged down one of those carts they use to drive around old people.  I figured if someone would know where our mysterious gate was, it would be him.  The answer was almost literally “there is a side hallway on the left near the vending machines.”  Now I’m no airport designer, but it seems that I would either have designed this better or added additional signage to point happless travelers in the right direction.  A sign indicating that gates 40 through 31 are this way was a good start, but right away I would have put another sign that said “oh by the way, you guys that want gates 34-36, go down that hallway next to the vending machines.”  We arrived at gate 34, verified this time what we were about to do, and immediately handed in our boarding passes and got on the plane.

Words to the wise:  When you travel, verify the gate number every time you pass a departure board.  They change all the time.