Thursday, May 13, 2010

A Long Dangerous Drive


This is it, the day I decide we will drive along the Atlantic coast the entire length of the island. Tobago is on 26 miles long and from Crown Point were we’re staying to Charlottesville should only take about an hour. That’s a laugh. The roads twist and turn, are narrow, rutted and non existent in a couple of places. They climb up steeply and plunge down the other side just as fast. In a couple of places, they were one lane wide around a blind curve. All in all, it was quite an adventure. I had to watch both sides of the road, look for photo opportunities and give Carl enough warning for him to safely pull over. There were many instances where I would see something to photograph after we were way by it so I tried to make note of the area for the trip back. We traveled through Scarborough along the ocean’s edge where the road was protected from the pounding by a sturdy concrete wall. When we arrived in Speyside, the Atlantic ocean was free to run wild through the streets and I could see erosive evidence of just such an instance. The big draw in Speyside was a restaurant called Jemma’s but we missed it on the way up. Come to think of it, we missed it on the way back, too so we stopped at a place called the Birdwatchers. The food was good, the breeze was refreshing and the cost was more than reasonable. Among our stops was a gray sand beach and an old sugar mill. We had a great day. Our “last meal” was free rum punch and a BBQ at Poolside. We returned to our villa to pack and it was suddenly pouring out. It rained hard for most of the night. The locals will be happy to have it.

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