As I write this it is late evening in Martnique and tomorrow I will be beginning a somewhat epic journey home, about which I think I will have a great deal to say late tomorrow, but I don’t want to anticipate too much because there are some possibilities of how it will go that will drastically shape it.  Be that as it may, today is enough to report on and so I will do that and not speculate on what is to come.  Today began in a really interesting way, with a large breakfast spread from the owner of the bungalow my family is staying in.  The breakfast included croissants, a pastry with chocolate in the middle whose name I keep forgetting, fruit juice, tea and coffee, bananas, yogurt, and baguettes with butter.  Of course, I was unable to eat it all and we had to scramble to do a quick change at 8:30 when it was time to head off on our adventures, and it was not until ten minutes later that we were able to head off once I figured out how to lock the door and we had all changed.

Once we were off the owner drove us through town and then up to a beautiful view of a sheltered bay at Le Marin, where a lot of boats were in dry dock as well as in the marina and bay.  After that we drove up to the Habitacion Clement, which ended up being a gorgeous rum factory where we got to try rum at the end of a lengthy tour that included a walk through botanical gardens, a look at the world of making rum as well as the Creole world of a gorgeous but not particularly large main house and various outbuildings that included a small hut where President George H.W. Bush and French President Mitterand discussed peace in the Middle East in 1991, where both of them came off rather well even if peace in that troubled area was and remains an elusive goal.  Although the steep inclines of the place were a challenge for my stepfather we were all able to make it through alright and after a couple of hours headed off to lunch.

Lunch itself proved to be a bit of a problem.  Le Petibonum in Le Carbet had plenty of fish on the menu and some of it was tasty (although not what I ordered for my entree), but their service was extremely slow and it seemed as if they had forgotten our menu.  They did, though, have some free range kitties that were running around and sleeping and begging for food and that was adorable enough to forgive some lapses, although not taking so much time to get us our food, so much so that we were unable to see as much as we were hoping to see, which would have been a challenge given how slow my family tends to travel through various places.  The restaurant had some good food but it was a bit spendy and slow, albeit with a great view of the Caribbean Sea.  Life is full of such tradeoffs.

After lunch was over about 2PM or so, we went to St. Pierre, which had been a thriving and beautiful town until the eruption of Mt. Pelee (which could still be seen in the distance) in May 1902.  The town still showed the effects of the volcanic eruption more than a century later, with many of the existing buildings and large number of ruins showing the scorch marks from the eruption still and plenty of buildings, including the jail and theater, among others, never having been rebuilt.  The town is one that certainly had some beautiful characteristics, including friendly people, charming stores, and a lot of obvious history, but it also had some really dark aspects to it, including the fact that the town is no longer a particularly large one and has really never recovered its business or its population in the aftermath of Pelee’s fury.  While we were at the town we saw a museum devoted to the volcanic eruption that had a lot of sobering comments and historical artifacts about the town as well as how much it suffered when somewhere around 30,000 people died in the eruption.  After that we saw the ruins of the jail and theater, and then it was time to shop, where my mom got a doll to add to her collection, and then it was time to get home and relax after a long and busy day.  Tomorrow promises to be another busy and long day.