Dropping into Hewanorra Airport at Vieux Fort at the extreme southern (and largely unpopulated) end of St. Lucia nearly 24 hours after leaving Chez Hillegass feels like falling down the rabbit hole. We left SFO at about 10 pm Friday, caught an early morning flight out of wintery Philadelphia directly to the tropics. An alternate reality. As we were standing in line to use one of the two available pieces of carbon paper to fill out the required forms reporting our lost piece of luggage, Johnny of St. Lucia National Car Rental finally came in and shepherded us through customs and the bureaucracy involved in recognizing our international driver's license for use in St. Lucia. He then took us in his car to show us a sea side cabin being renovated for occupancy and then to his office. Fording truly impressive mud puddles and eyeing the gathering dark, we did our best to shorten the tour, one man welcoming ceremony, sales job, and considerable paperwork to take possession of the cheapest car on offer: a largely intact Daihatsu which started without use of the gas peddle. All the luggage which did arrive (plus self and bride) made a 10 lb package for the 5 lb sack of a vehicle. Setting out in the gloaming road, bride chanting "drive left, drive left", I practiced not signaling turns with the wiper control and not hitting 1st gear when 3rd was called for. The road winds the length of the island, first down the spectacular and empty windward coast then winding west over the mountains in a tropical rain forest and finally up the bustling (relatively) western, leeward coast to Rodney bay. The rental car costs about the same as a taxi and provides enormous entertainment value. Potholes as large as the car, dark people in dark clothes wandering in the welcome cool of the night and oncoming headlights swinging drunkenly from side to side as the drivers avoid potholes made this jet lagged, sleep deprived driver as thrilled as a kid on a roller coaster ride. He was just about as happy to arrive and stop driving. We had reserved a room at Chez Marie Alish about a block from the boatyard where Eaux Vives has slept through the summer. After a few minutes of terrorizing pedestrians with our attempts to negotiate reverse gear for the first time, we were happily being shown to our garden front room by Castro, the builder, gardener, proprietor and provider of morning coffee and coconuts.
  We may have definitely figured out this transition a little better this year. A car and a room for two days makes it a lot easier to recover from the trip, re-provision and generally clean up our dirty, moldy and partially dismantled winter home. We had nearly a week of scraping, painting, scrubbing, mounting, lashing, hauling and fixing, making lists and checking off each item. Living in the boat yard was dirty, buggy and would be moderately unpleasant, were it not for the fact we are in the Caribbean. Our first day on the boat, Tito of "Alleluia" (see pictures of the tank on the beach in Culebra) pointed out that it was Sunday and dominos were on at lunch at the St. Lucia Yacht Club. John of "Icon duet" wandered through and "New Passages" looks as good as new after a beating in Grenada. In addition, there are new friends such as the phlegmatic Finn on SUVI whose halyard broke just as his wife hauled him up past the spreaders using a power winch. Not too shaken by the fact his certain death was averted only by the luck of his feet landing on the spreaders, when we finally got him down he was concerned only that he might have lost his halyard down the mast and went right up again to complete the repair.
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