If one were to graph the devolution of my island vehicles there would be a 0% correlation with financial health and a 100% correlation to the amount of years spent living on rocks.
Hawaii: I call my time in Hawaii The Lexus Years. Champagne colored (to match my favorite drink) with butter-soft cream leather, I often found myself suspecting as I drove around Honolulu’s perfectly paved highways that the alarm system in this magnificent car likely consisted of ninjas that would pop from the hand-sewn seams of the steering wheel and battle ferociously against any attempted intrusion.
It was a hybrid so I felt green and it also had seat warmers which I didn’t use at all.
St. Lucia: When I moved to St. Lucia, I said farewell to my beautiful Alexis (as I called her) and bought a boat which was needed as the house we rented was on a bay and the grocery store was more easily accessible via boat than by car. Plus, the ocean has no potholes.
Fast forward a year to when we moved into a house on the top of a steep hill and suddenly Opah (as I called her) was not enough to make up for the pain, sweat, and tears that walking up and down that mountain induced. We rented a truck to park the boat in the yard with and then bought a very small and very used Nissan March filled with sand and indecipherable Japanese characters.
Abaco: A possible chicken and egg dilemma and an outlier on our otherwise linear devolution graph. There was nowhere to go here so we didn’t have a vehicle. Or, since we didn’t have a vehicle was there nowhere to go?
South Caicos: Half of the roads aren’t even paved in South Caicos so after it rains the potholes resemble fancy, al-natural mud baths and I was often tempted to create my own spa scenario in one as they solar heated throughout the day.
South Caicos is the sort of place where only an ATV will do and so that’s what I drove there (and dubbed her Atva), ending up delightfully mud-splattered for every occasion and feeling all-in-all like I could finally and truthfully call myself an island girl.
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Has your island car situation changed based on which island you’ve been living on and/or how many years you’ve been living on a rock? If so, how?
Current Rock of Residence:
St. Lucia
Island Girl Since:
2006
Originally Hails From:
Hawaii & Texas
Faced with the choice of using her college degree to find a “career” somewhere on the US mainland or moving to an island, as soon as her tasseled graduation cap hit the ground, she was on her way to Honolulu. A little under a decade later Sara found herself on a press trip in Saint Lucia and hired by a resort there to create destination marketing content and materials. One thing led to another and after too many 24-hour commutes from Hawaii to Saint Lucia + a Trinidadian boyfriend to call her own, she sorted her possessions into “worth the cost of shipping” or not piles and made her way across the Pacific.
Since then, she has created a hospitality & tourism consulting business, Coral Range, that keeps her island hopping, lived on Abaco in the Bahamas for a year, learned to cook everything from bodi to salt fish, and fully embraced the Caribbean lifestyle – though her chipping and wining will always need some work.
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