At home and abroad

Back in 1977, Steve and his friend Roy Wysack wrote the science-fictional Handbook for Space Pioneers. It described 9 planets open for human settlement in the year 2376. Among the choices open to aspiring immigrants, the place that most appealed to me was Poseidous, a watery world with no major land masses – just hundreds of thousands of islands on which wildly diverse human cultures were taking shape.

As Steve and I approached our trip last year to Indonesia, it struck me that the Asian island nation might be more like Poseidous than anywhere I’d been on Earth. But now we’re about to travel to a region where that’s even truer. We leave tomorrow for Miami, then fly the next day to Grenada, the first of six Caribbean islands we’ll be exploring.

Our only prior Caribbean experience was our 2012 trip to Cuba. (Although I had created this blog by then, I didn’t post anything about that adventure because Americans weren’t supposed to be traveling there.) We had a great time, but the Communist stronghold’s neighbors didn’t much interest us. Steve and I both thought of most Caribbean islands only as magnets for beach and resort-lovers. While we live just 5 minutes from a nice beach, neither of us ever go there to lie on it.

Only recently did it dawn on me there could be other reasons to visit the region. Its cultures might not be as manifold as those of Poseidous, but more than a dozen sovereign nations and almost as many dependent territories occupy the balmy water adjoining the Gulf of Mexico. Chris Columbus discovered the New World here, and the anguished cries of African slaves filled the Caribbean breezes before they became commonplace in America. Big Sugar got its start in the islands, and pirates spiced up the scene for decades. Maybe it wouldn’t be boring, after all.

I quickly figured out we couldn’t go everywhere. My early dreams of getting from one Caribbean country to another via ferries also didn’t take long to evaporate. If you’re not cruising or sailing your own boat, it can be weirdly challenging to get around, I learned.

I wound up with an itinerary that will take us from Miami to Grenada, followed by stays in St. Lucia, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and finally Jamaica. If we wind up doing a lot of sunbathing and snorkeling, I may not post much. But if we have any interesting experiences, I’ll do my best to report on them here.