It was like something out of a Hummer rally. I was afraid to try to sit down in the filthy bed of the truck that had stopped to offer us a ride, but I really needed to lower my center of gravity and the thorn trees sweeping the cab roof were tearing at my white knuckles while I tried to duck behind the protection of the cab without losing my death grip on the roof. Poor Marce had tried to squat down but was becoming a physics experiment bouncing around the truck bed unable to hang on well enough due to her still painful forearm. I was afraid to turn around to see what our friend Mark was doing to survive. The driver was barely creeping along the washed out trail driving at a slow walking pace but it was still bone-jarring rough, oftentimes launching us off the truck bed.
It all started innocently enough when Mark said he’d found a shortcut to the large Ace Hardware in St. Georges, less than a half hour walk from Clarkes Court Bay. Using a network of trails rising up out of Bob’s marina we walked past the owner-described “proper home” of a local artist who paints reproductions of his favorite priceless classics, you know, the Mona Lisa, Girl with the Pearl Earring, etc. The house has Prospect painted in bold script above the all-glass front wall. I guess that’s so you can see his priceless collection of paintings on the back wall.
Things were going well until the guys in the construction truck offered us a ride. When they stopped to let us out we all popped out of there like we’d just gotten zapped with electricity.
We made it to Ace without major injury and wandered around with wobbly legs and that life-affirming feeling you get when you’ve dodged another one, and with the added bonus of truly arctic air conditioning. We aimlessly sampled several stores without conviction to buy much because the trek back to Clarkes Court Bay was hanging over us.
We could quickly see why the truck lurched about so violently. It was even hard to walk with washed-out sections filled with broken concrete blocks or lumps of leftover concrete or debris. Like everywhere in Grenada the entrepreneurial spirit moves them. Even on this horrible “road” we found fledgling businesses.
We probably shouldn’t have undertaken the expedition in the heat of a Grenadian summer afternoon. Completely shattered we finally shuffled down out of the hills into Bob’s marina, to dinghy back home to Escape Velocity. We slept well that night.