Home by Another Way by Robert Benson Read Free Book Online Page A

restaurant chains and no casinos and no city-block-sized duty-free shops.
    On the other hand, according to the symbols on themap, there are two places to get ice cream, two places to shoot pool, three ATMs, and an egg farm.

    At the stop sign at the beginning of the journey, we most often choose to turn right and head south down the leeward side, hugging the shoreline, headed toward Princetown, remembering our way around the island.
    In only a couple of minutes or so, we pass by the Galley Door and then Cassandra’s Café and Domingo’s Beach Bar and Miss Lil’s Famous Cuisine. There are forty restaurants on the island, and we are eating our way through them. It is research that must be done, and we believe that we are up to the task.
    We skirt the shoreline for a while, rolling past houses that sit by the bay, and then take the sharp curve that leads to the hill that leads up to St. Peter’s Anglican Church. It is where we go to church when we are here. Like the other four big Anglican churches on the island, it is a great stone structure that has beenhere for hundreds of years. Each of them sits at the center of one of the parishes that make up the island, and each one is an official hurricane shelter. And each one takes your breath away when you see it.
    Soon we pass the entrance to Three Palms, the one large Western resort on the island. It has large villas and a few thousand transplanted palm trees and enough restaurants and lounges and satellite televisions and day spas and tennis courts and tee times to ensure that the people who stay there never have to visit St. Cecilia. They come from the airport in specially marked vans and disappear into the gates long before they get to Princetown. It has all the comforts of the suburbs with better weather. It is a cruise ship with bigger staterooms and a golf course. It is like visiting another island, maybe another country, but it is not like visiting St. Cecilia. It is also the reason there is virtually no unemployment on St. Cecilia.
    A little straight stretch of road through the palm trees that hide the bay from view and suddenly we are in Princetown, the capital city. It is an old city and asmall city, with narrow streets and low buildings. It bustles with life. For the most part it looks more like a village in the English countryside than a village in the English countryside.
    We go through the town and through the roundabout on the other side and start up the hill toward the highlands. We are headed east now, and we are up in the hills on the southern part of the volcano. This is old plantation-inn territory here. There are a dozen or so of them, lovely vacation spots hidden in the rain forest and built in and on and among the ruins of once-great sugar plantations. We are too far up in the hills now and too deep into the trees to see the water anymore.
    The last stretch of good road drops down the long hill into St. Andrew’s Parish, and at Midway the road changes, and so does the island. We are on the windward side now, and when we look to the right, we can very often see the Atlantic stretched out. Sometimes the view is so breathtaking that we stop the car just to look.
    There are little villages and hamlets spread alongthe main roads here. They have schools and small businesses; they have little chapels, and they have snackettes. You can go into Bruno’s or Culturama or the Mango Tree. All of them will serve you fried chicken or rice and peas or a curry that makes you grin every time you think of it.
    We work our way along the road that runs along this eastern edge of the island, looking down across what were once cane fields and farms and plantations. We make the turn toward the west at the road that goes down to the shore at Three Kings Bay. Then through the little village at the top of the island and past the airport and back to the good road that will take us back to Windbreak. The land flattens out again, and the shoreline is no longer pounded by surf, and