RETURN TO NEVIS2008 [editor’s note: During Mom’s Florida years, she left us a lot of pictures of people at parties. She had several very good friends there, like Christa Kelsey and Judy Kerr and her neighbor Cindy Lindburg, but I only really know their names, and cannot identify any of the people in the pictures. This piece about a trip to Nevis and the next one are the only snippets we have from Mom that discuss those friends. During this period, she bought a townhouse with a dock for her boat. She sold the boat, then sold the townhouse and returned to Texas in 2008.]
Nevis, West Indies A Trip with Girlfriends: January 2008 Travelers: Pat Cole, Christa Kelsey, and Judy Kerr
O
ur odyssey began at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, January 22nd with a nasty alarm clock pulling me from the arms of Morpheus. We had agreed to take only carry-on luggage, so I packed in my sea bag. My traveling companions, who had started this “carry-on” deal, both showed up with sizable suitcases. You know, the kind with wheels and handles? While I had all my stuff hanging over my shoulder. Christa’s husband, Jim, had volunteered to be our taxi driver to Orlando airport. He and Christa picked me up 6:15, then picked Judy up, and we were officially off to Nevis. Christa’s 96-year-old father, Fred, told us to have fun in Venus, as he couldn’t remember the name of the island. We made all our flights with no problems and arrived on Nevis, aka Venus, at 3:00 p.m., caught a cab to the Hermitage Plantation Hotel, had our luggage thrown into our cottage, and went straight to the bar for our first Rum Punch. The 350-year-old main house is the oldest surviving wooden structure in the Caribbean. I started seeing faces I recognized, and soon, Hermitage owner and old friend, Richard Lupinacci, appeared with his wonderful smile and a big “welcome back” hug. His lovely wife, Maureen, came down a little later. It felt like I had gone home. We were so hungry that, to
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Pat’s Horse Tales
prevent us chewing on the furniture, P.G. the bartender brought us some calamari and a little later we had a superb West Indian dinner. Soon after, we wobbled down the hill to our cottage, having consumed liberal amounts of wine and rum punch, and fell into our beds. The next day at 7:00 a.m., there arose such a clatter I thought Christa and Judy were having one hell of a hair pulling fight, breaking furniture over each other. I looked in on them and they both were still snuggled down in their beds. Judy peeped out from under her pillow and said, “What was that?” Christa said it was coconuts falling on the roof. I, being the old island pro, said it was a Monkey Pod tree throwing its seeds on the roof. Out on our screened porch, I found a troop of 20 or more Vervet monkeys doing the “River Dance” on our roof. Every morning we were there, they came across our cottage roof between 6:45 and 7:00 a.m., did their dance, and threw seed pods on the roof for 15 or 20 minutes, then went off to do whatever monkeys do all day. No alarm clock necessary.
