Troll Echos

No trip to the tropics during hurricane season is complete without almost having to deal with a hurricane.  Ours included.  Hurricane Omar moved through the area around 200 miles from St. Lucia while we were there.  Since it was rainy season while we were there and there was rain everyday anyway, few people even noticed.  The effect if had on our tiny little island was nothing more than large waves thankfully.  

At the edge of our resort and just past the massive pool is a large stone wall with convenient stairs going down to the beach at random intervals.  When the seas were normal and happy, water never made it anywhere near that wall.  In fact in most places there were 20 to 70 feet of beach.  During the time when Omar was exerting its climatological influences the waves were actually around eight feet tall and were hitting the stone wall with enough force to throw salty mist at people in the pool.  

After a few hours of pounding waves the worst was over and the seas began to slip away back to their original position several yards from the wall.  The damage was done however.  The beach was effectively gone.  In its place was an impressive collection of rocks of all shapes and sizes and almost no sand at all.  The last step down to the beach from one of the sets of stairs was now slightly over three feet tall instead of the previous size of about a normal step.  Thankfully the ocean happily works itself out, and in so doing works things back to the way they are supposed to be.  Several days after the waves subsided, normal waves slowly dragged sand that had been churned up back to the beach and deposited it gently back over the rocks occasionally grabbing a rock and dragging it back out to sea as it left.  

At the end of the day it was very cool to see larger waves than are available anywhere in the northeast and I’m glad they weren’t any more dangerous than mere photo opportunities.

It was bound to happen.  It seems everytime I travel anywhere I end up sick in some way or other.  I’m not sure why it happens, or how I got so lucky to have this pattern, but it does.  Some may say, “Well you sat on a plane with 200 other people for over 6 hours.”, but that’s not it because I’ve gotten sick driving to Vermont in my own car too.  Best of all, there is never any obvious cause of the illness.  I’m just sick, that’s all, thanks for playing, and with any random collection of symptoms.

In the tropics, my body’s choice was a day of mild fever (100.5F) followed by almost non-stop trips to the bathroom.  The rest of this story is not for the squimish and you may want to go on to another post prior to getting to my brief but descriptive story of Liquishits™.

For lack of a more graceful way to describe what happened to me, I will say that I would sit down and make a noise something like someone pouring a bucket of water into a toilet.  Gut wrenching pain and about 3 seconds of high-speed Liquishits™ and it was time to clean up after what seemed like a war.  If that wasn’t bad enough, there was a day where I would leave the now partially destroyed wreck of a bathroom only to return to the same freak show mere minutes later.  I said many times during our stay “My kingdom for a solid poop.”, but it was not meant to be.  The gut wrenching pain tapered off, the frequency of Liquishits™ lessened to about once after each meal, and the consistancy got a little less liquidy, but the solidity was not restored until I got home.

It wasn’t pretty, sorry you had to read that.  There’s nothing to see here, move along.

Living in America has all soda drinkers very used to things like sodium benzoate (to preserve freshness) and high fructose corn syrup in their day to day bubbly sugar water consumption.  Down in the Caribbean however, corn is missing, sugar cane is grown everywhere, and preservatives are not something you are likely to find in anything you eat or drink.  This produces an interesting opportunity indeed.  One where a soda drinker can enjoy outstandingly delicious soda.

My soda of choice here in America is Coka-Cola.  Good old fashioned high test sugar laiden brown bubble water.  Sadly the ingredients on the American version of Coke include things like “Sugar and/or High Fructose Corn Syrup”, which to me indicates that they mix all their sweeteners together and at the end have honestly no clue how much of each ends up in each bottle.  Presumably they mix them and the desired ratio ends up in each bottle or the flavor of a bottle of Coke would vary widely, and it clearly doesn’t vary much at all.  Down in the tropics however, something wonderful was waiting for me behind that red label I know so well.

At first I never even thought to look at the ingredients.  I opened a bottle of Coke from our well stocked mini-fridge and took a sip.  Something was very wrong.  It was like Coke, but not exactly.  It was delicious.  Outstandingly delicious.  I sat there with the bottle in my hand and felt a bit like a polar bear that just enjoyed another Christmas Coca-Cola.  A grin, a feeling of peace.  Heck, it was soda nirvana.  I slowly twisted the bottle around to find the nutritional information panel and the ingredient list so I could see why this Coke tasted so much better than any I’d ever had.  The nutritional information panel was entirely missing.  No calories, no carbs, no fat, no nothing.  The ingredients however was a shorter list than I’d ever seen on a bottle of Coke and revealed exactly why this bottle I held in my hand brought a smile to my face like no other bottle of soda ever has before.

Ingredients:  Carbonated Water, Sugar, Caramel Colour, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavors, Caffeine.

That was it.  Real sugar.  100%.  And no preservatives at all.  To my friends at Coke:  Please offer this recipe here in America.  It’s so much better than the version you sell here I could hardly imagine drinking standard American Coke ever again, and would happily pay a premium if required to get “the good stuff.”