Our time here on Grenada is coming to a close. It has been truly a delightful place to visit. To all of our friends who recommended this as a place to spend “hurricane season,” thank you very much.

It is one of the happy places. The locals genuinely love and are proud of their island. Not a lot of them are rich by any standard of the average American, but the cost of living is low, and the basic necessities are cheap. As one of our taxi drivers said, “There is no reason anyone here should go to bed hungry. Food grows on every tree.”

We just celebrated the local holiday of “Thanksgiving.” Which I expected to be a typical harvest festival, but it is not. It is actually a celebration of the American lead “intervention” in 1983 that put an end to a violent marxist coup. Most of the locals do not call it an invasion, and seem to be extraordinarily happy that it happened. Americans, both individually, and in the abstract, are welcomed here.

There are many examples of foreign aid here. The Chinese continue to build housing complexes to replace stock lost to the hurricane in 2005. The Japanese rebuilt several bridges. The locals are happy to accept the largesse, but also openly refer to these projects as “bribes.” In the case of the Chinese to gain a vote against Taiwan in the UN, and for the Japanese, to leverage a vote in the UN in favor of Japan’s whaling industry. When similar projects from the USA and Canada are discussed, they are presented as simple gestures of good-will.

Crime, unlike on some of the neighboring islands, is extremely low, and the scenery is lush and gorgeous.

Plans…

From here in Port Louis, in the next couple of days, we will be heading north toward Carriacou, the northernmost island in the country. We have an urgent need to replace a seacock valve that requires the boat be lifted out of the water for a few hours, and the boatyard in Tyrell Bay can do that for us.

From there, we will head to Martinique. Bill will (probably!) be headed to Panama to do a delivery of an Amel to Texas. Once that 2 to 3 week project is complete, we will continue to move north. Another customer for a pre-purchase survey awaits us in St Thomas, and then we get to explore more of the Bahamas before returning to the USA.