Chronicles of a Shoemaker's Daughter

There are benefits and drawbacks to travelling solo. Depending on where you are in your life-journey, sometimes your benefit IS your drawback. For example, you get to spend a lot of time with yourself - alone, with no distractions. So you had better have a good relationship with you. Lucky for me, I have been working on my relationship with me for a while. One of the pacts that I made with myself prior to leaving on my November trip was that I would try not to stress out over things that I could not control and to only plan enough of an itinerary to ensure that I got to where I was going safely. Then, I promised myself that I would leave the rest up to fate and simply go with the flow. This plan definitely worked out and I am so glad that I get along with me. You see, in recounting this one, of many adventures that I experienced during my November excursion into the Caribbean, I left out one minor detail: The "lucky-seven" combo seemed to follow me around for about 24 hour...

It is still November 16th and our Grenadian "rescue team" had gone so far as to canvas a number of exhausted and confused tourists, who just wanted to get to Grenada. Most of us looked like the proverbial "deer caught in the headlights" by now. The Grenadian gentlemen, enusred us that they would find us suitable accomodation, that we could afford. In short order, with the help of an airport representative and the Port-of-Spain telephone directory, they had narrowed downd the choices of digs, but it seemed very unlikely that LIAT would ever reimburse us if we opted not to stay at the Belair. Several couples/families were quite distraught by now, as their luggage never made it from Barbados. I felt a bit smug by this stage, because I had been travelling only with carry-on bags, packed to the brim, mind you, and I was sitting on them! Some travellers opted to wait all night at the airport. Other passengers/families were Caribbean nationals and had family or friends i...

When I think about the second leg of my November journey, I can still hear the sweet Caribbean-accented voices of the flight attendants, "welcome to LIAT, the airline of the Caribbean" ... in retrospect, they should warn passengers that LIAT is an acronym for "leave island any time." In my case, though, I thing the airplane gods must have really wanted me to have some sort of semi-romantic interlude in Trinidad, which incidentally was nowhere on my travel itinerary. It was Friday the 16th, not Friday the 13th ... but there were elements at work that day that conspired against a smooth, uneventful transition from a place in the Leeward Islands or northern(ish) Caribbean to an island in the Windward or southern part of the Caribbean. My friends on the St. Kitts & Nevis Friendly Forum found this little side-story quite amusing, and they wondered how I have become so gifted at the art of embellishment. What is really sad/wonderful about this little tale is that it...

Footwear has been on my mind a lot lately. Actually, footwear has been on my mind for most of my life, because, you guessed it – I come by my obsession honestly - my dad was a shoemaker. Not just any old shoemaker, but a real old-world craftsman. He taught me all the finer points of selecting the appropriate shoe – everything from assessing and choosing just the right type of leather, soft and supple, to ensuring that every boot, shoe or sandal had exactly the right amount of properly engineered arch-support. Now footwear only figures into this particular story in one way: I had spent several months stressing over how to fit the various sandals and flip-flops that are required for a two-island Caribbean holiday into my carry-on luggage. My allotment of travel “necessities” should have included at least one pair of high, Italian (of course, what else!?) cork and patent-leather strappy wedge slip-ons that I could hardly walk in, but that would have been just perfect to wear to a casino...