This past month, I've been traveling - two weeks on the HAL Maasdam, three days before and 10 days after. It was a Jazzsea cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale. About 2/3rds of the people on the cruise were jazz people - either fans, or players. There were four professional jazz bands on the cruise with them. I booked the cruise before I knew that it was a Jazzsea cruise so it was a nice surprise. I booked it because there were three islands that I had not visited before. (St. Barths, Grenada, and Bonaire)
One of my interests other than lighthouses is cemeteries, and that was the forefront of what I planned for the various ports. Although I got a new camera last year - a Canon, and I also got a long lens, I didn't take many lighthouse photos on this cruise. I didn't even look up the lighthouses until I got home.
But I did get some, almost by accident.
Going down we were on I-95 and didn't look for lighthouses. The itinerary was as follows
St. Thomas
St. Barths
St. Lucia
Barbados
Grenada
Bonaire
Curacao
Bahamas private island
In St. Thomas, we got a cab and visited 8 cemeteries, two Moravian, a Jewish, a Danish, Western, Eastern, Coki and Hoffman. We took 360 photos of gravestones, but no lighthouses.
St. Barths - the tour of interest was $68 each for a hour cab ride with no narrative (they speak French there and don't speak much English). So I figured that it would be better to rent a car for the day which was 50 Euros, and then we could do what we wanted. The first problem was we were late getting in to St. Barths - the water was VERY rough and the captain moved the boat at least once. He kept telling us that we shouldn't go ashore that we should stay on the boat.
We were supposed to meet the car rental person a 8:30. We had breakfast in the buffet just because we wanted to be ready at 8:30, and we went down to get our tender tickets. But they kept us waiting for a hour while they took the tours first. Finally got to shore at 9:30 and found no car person. I tried to phone and the phone said the number wasn't valid. So I went over and talked to the guys in the kiosk including a guy who drove up in a red Chevy Spark (the kind of car we were to have) from Avis. They phoned the airport office of
Turbe for me and said the lady would be back in 10 minutes. And she was.
We went over the car an located all the dents and then got the car and started off. The map had very little detail and only some vague name (no street names) but I knew that two of the cemeteries that I wanted to find were in Lorient, and one was near the public beach and one was across from the airport. Two of them I couldn't find where they might be on the map at all. Since we had to turn the car in at the airport, I decided the airport one would be last. So we started out for the public beach which was north of town.
Problem. The road to the north turned into one way south. So we bumbled around in town (very narrow, crowded and potholed streets) and finally found a road which was going the direction we wanted, except it went straight up. This was where we saw the Gustavia lighthouse
- it was up on the hill above us.It is an active lighthouse - a round conical tower painted white with a single red band at the top. The lantern has been removed and is on display at the Musée Municipal de St.-Barthélemy in Gustavia. It isn't an old lighthouse - it was built in 1961 on the site of an old fort.
I took these photos while Bob was driving up and down the mountains, dodging trash trucks and other drivers who knew where they were going, and coming to a circle and going out in various directions - deciding we were going the wrong way and then come back and trying another direction. Bob grumbling all the time. And these are the only ones I have of it. I did not know that we could have gone up to the fort for a really nice view of the harbor.
We took photos in one of the cemeteries that I could find - about 150 out of 300 we took in this port.
St. Lucia - we had been to St. Lucia before, but Bob hadn't gotten off the boat. So this time we had a tour called Island Splendor Drive. Our first stop was a house on top of a hill called St. Marks. That was my first sight of the
Vigie Light, Castries
I did a little better here - at first I thought this was a different lighthouse because I didn't see all the antennas