Long Island Road Trip

Tuesday we went ashore to arrange a rental car.  Then we decided we would go to the ocean beach.  A strange thing to do you say, since we've been on or near the ocean since October.  Most of the time we've spent in the Bahamas we've been in Exuma Sound or on the Bahama Banks - shallow waters protected by the islands from the wind and waves of the Atlantic.  At any rate...  Long Island is about 80 miles long but only about 1 to 4 miles wide.  (BTW, that's not why it's named "Long Island".)  Salt Pond, where we are, is at a narrow point so we decided to hike across to see the ocean proper.  I won't bore you with how deep blue the water color is, or how the waves just keep rolling in, or how pretty the sand is, or how much cooler it is on the sea breeze side.  Nope, just like Mrs. Robinson in the movie The Graduate, I want to talk about plastic.  Plastic floats, and has a half-life longer than our national debt.  As a result virtually all the ocean side beaches we've been on have been covered with plastic - crates, shoes, rope, building materials, and BOTTLES!  I'm convinced if a product has ever been put in a bottle you can eventually find one of those bottles on some beach.  (I first noticed this on beaches in Greece in 1972, so it's nothing new.  We didn't see paper, so maybe paper bags ARE a better choice at the grocery store.)

For dinner Tuesday Sue fried one of the plantains that we bought Saturday.  She cut it into inch slices and then fried them until golden.  Then she drained them and smashed them and put them back in the frying pan briefly.  They turned out crispy and brown but rather tasteless.  Salt helped a bit.  Hopefully the second one will taste better and sweeter after it ripens a bit more.

Wednesday morning we picked up our rental car, a small left hand drive Suzuki.  They drive on the "wrong" side of the road here but traffic was light so no problems there.  They have no lane markings or passing markings and very few speed limit signs.  We drove the entire length of the island on The Queen's Highway.  It is the only north-south road.  We saw the very top of Dean's Blue Hole.  A blue hole is some sort of well-like hole in the ocean, and this one is supposedly the deepest one.  I wish I had had Christian's hookah breathing device...  There seemed to be a lot of churches on the island so when we got to the southern end we started counting.   We came up with over 40 in the 80 mile drive to the north end.  We also did a cave tour of the biggest cave (so the tour guide/owner said) in the Bahamas.  We were going to drive out to see a monument to Christopher Columbus but the road was SO bad I wouldn't even drive someone else's car there!  We walked a couple of lovely deserted beaches.  Sue found several beautiful shells to add to her collection.  She also found a sea bean, which is a seed from a tree in Africa about the size of a flattened golf ball.  She has been looking for them on the beaches since we got here.

For various reasons this is about as far south as we plan to go.  Since Sunday the winds have been blowing quite strong out of the NE.  The forecast is for strong NE winds until Tuesday or Wednesday.  It looks like lots of people have the same idea about not going further south as the achorage is gradually filling up.  This weekend there were about 25 boats anchored around us.  This morning there are almost 40.  I think we might try to sail back to George Town tomorrow to get water and then start working our way north.

Thanks for commenting, Eileen.  There is a book exchange here so we have new reading material. I can't check blog stats with the Kindle - probably readership is way down.