Reality Check: I hear a voice coming from behind the closed door of the head. It's Randy. He says, "I think I'm going bald."

We've escaped from the fleshpots of Tyrell Bay. Like the Hotel California, and perhaps Verro Beach and Georgetown, maybe Hog Island and the Lagoon in St. George's, Tyrell Bay is one of those places that you drop the hook, and a month later, you realize, whoooee, we've been here a damn month! A month with no decent wine, not a single chicken breast, but hey, you've got real friends here, nearly a routine evolving, and a certain rapport with the shopkeepers in Hillsborough. You strike up conversations with people everywhere you go. Kim and Clair and I, on a girls' shopping day, stopped to christmas shop at the shipping container on the beach that houses the best t-shirt shop, and we stopped for a beer or two at the Hard Wood Bar at Paradise Beach, and fell into conversation with Donald and his wife Alcida. I wouldn't be surprised if Kim and David ended up spending Christmas with them. Donald used to live a few blocks from Clair in London. The more you travel, the smaller everything gets. And isn't it nice?

On our last shopping trip to Hillsborough (thank you again Christine at Patti's Deli, for having nice wine and cheese), I asked a guy at Ade's Grocery Store why they never had chicken breasts. Chicken thighs, legs, bags of feet (and bags of lips, RS says), and all sorts of unsavoury collections, pickled, salted and frozen, of the outer bits of pigs and cows, but never chicken breasts? "Dey too expensive," he says, "we can't move them."
So we moved because we're hungry for good food, and because if you're a cruiser who never moves your boat, you end up in a nautical trailer park, with various attendant bad habits (think elderly "Trailer Park Boys" with outboards).

Jean Baptiste, the Frenchman who runs the Lazy Turtle in Tyrell Bay (great pizza, have I mentioned that?) said that there was a good French bakery in Union, and we could get croissants and baguettes there. Randy asked him if the bread was Good French Bread. Jean Baptiste replied, "For the Caribbean, it's good. If we were in France, it would be a piece of sheet." JB - great guy, great dancer. He also told me, after multiple rums, "I haaaaate the French! They're sooooooo arrrroggannntt! They sink zey know everyzing about food and wine!!!"

For three days in Union, a full 8 miles from Tyrell Bay, we gorged ourselves on deeply stinky unpasteurized Camembert slathered on better-than-okay baguettes, croissants with more butter than necessary AND jam for breakfast, and we've sampled the many fruit and veg stands that actually have snappin good fruit and veg. You buy four or five different things, and the lady invariably tucks in something else, a few bananas, an orange, just to thank you for buying from her. The grocery stores are chock full of chicken breasts and Farmers UHT milk, fer gawd's sake (made in Halifax, NS).

We walked uptown to the post office to mail my registration stuff so I can get an ID card saying I'm a Certified Open Water Diver, and on our way back downtown, we wandered into an alternate universe when we entered what appeared to be a shop, and were beckoned by an elderly white woman with bright red hair who told us to come in further, further, there's more to see. The labyrinth worked its way down a buggy alley, from t-shirt shop full of sloppy daubed clothes and nasty souvenirs, past a couple of wee bars in corners with odd signs (champagne by the glass!) past dogs asleep, a corridor of painted bar stools, more dogs, an elderly man with no apparent clothes sitting at a computer, more dogs, a strong smell of resin, and this weird apparition with dyed red hair leading us, single file, further in along the alley under the trees and wobbly fences and walls. We obligingly viewed her collection of expensive paintings (primitive, I think, is how I might gently put it. Exuberantly deluded, in terms of the pricing. She must have to dust them frequently.) We backed out carefully, again, single file, and felt glad to be back in the normal main street world of Union. But where else in the world could or would a 70 or 80-year-old women run her place of business wearing a tube top and Daisy Duke cut-offs?

I also had an encounter with the typical Caribbean Male. A blustery afternoon, but I decided I needed to get some exercise, so I jumped into the dinghy and rowed over to the little beach by the airport for a walk. I met up with Garvin and his friend Kevin, about 10 and 6 respectively, and we had a chat about things as I walked down the beach. First off, they wanted to come to the boat and look around. Secondly, they wanted a ride in Marjorie. Third, they wanted to know if I had a daughter. (Boats, sex, in that order.) They were pleased to hear that I did, and wanted to know how old she was.

Twenty-three, I said. Kevin immediately darted a look at Garvin and asked, She too old for we?
Kevin then told me that he was 16. He wasn't too put off when I told him he was pretty short for 16.
As I headed back to the dinghy to row home, Garvin was half hiding behind a tree, and as I walked away I heard him say, You have a nice ass.

Made my day.