Caribbean Adventure - We don't need no stinkin plan

It had been a while since we traveled anywhere other than the occasional day trip to Ocean City MD, to visit friends, or a bit of business during 2012.  It was actually the intermittent intervals of business that interrupted our traveling, clearly a lapse in judgement allowing business to interfere with life.  The contract schedule was such that it was difficult to plan much of anything in advance.  After business finally settled back into its rightful place, we got back to flying Angel Flights on a regular schedule.  Even with that, though, it had been a while since Ann and I had gone anywhere.  

We emailed friends about it being "time for an adventure" some time in February 2013.  Somewhat related, it had been several years since the last time we'd been to Oshkosh.  That last time we met a fella who had formed a new business called Caribbean Flying Adventures.  Jim Parker is a retired State Department guy who put his knowledge to work by organizing gaggles of aircraft to the Caribbean and offering advice for those interested in making trips by themselves. 

The original, daring (some would say "sketchy") idea for an adventure had been to head for the Caribbean with no plan other than to go to Trinidad and back.  We'd stop when we found something we liked, and move on when the mood took us. 

Apparently, there are members of the family who need something slightly more well thought out.  So while thinking through the whole concept of an adventure, some additional constraints were established.  Among these were:

  1) actually having reservations at hotels along the way,

  2) knowing in advance where there was avgas,

  3) arranging rental cars, and . . .

  4) most important in some views, dedicating suitable time to actually spend on some of those beautiful beaches you see in the travel brochures. 

Well, with all these demands, the adventure got turned into a real live plan, reservations and all!  Considering the degree of compromise required, I clearly don't belong in Washington DC.  Unfortunately, our friends were unable to participate -- possibly because of all the unreasonable demands for sleeping accommodations.

The chart below is a screen shot of our route (the blue line) down and back from Foreflight, an iPad flight planning app.  Frederick MD (FDK) was our departure point to the north and Grand Case St Martin was the southern-most point.  A lot of the points we visited are shown with their airport or navaid designator, but the underlying map shows regular names.  

We decided not to push all the way to Trinidad, though as you can see we weren't all that far away (about an inch and a half or so ;-).  It was a compromise.  The problem was there are a lot of islands very close together between St Martin and Trinidad.  The flying part would have been easy enough -- it's only about 480 nm or 3 hours flying time -- but if you actually wanted to do more than punch your "I've been there" ticket, it would have taken much more time.  There are at least 10 "likely" places to visit along that route, so even though that works out to about 20 minutes between each one, a day minimum at each adds many more days, and Rule 4 adds even more than that.   

Even with the somewhat simplified route, deciding exactly what we wanted to see was not as easy as it looked.  There are a lot of sources for this sort of thing, but many emphasize a hotel with links to nearby restaurants and points of interest, or realtors renting homes.  There is a lot of hit and miss until you stumble across something of interest.  One of the links that was very useful was the CIA World Factbook put out by everyone's favorite intelligence service.  They do an excellent job of reviewing the geography, environment, population, economy, politics, and other facets of every country on earth, and it's all there in an unclassified form for anyone to use.  

If the Factbook provided a good summary of what you were headed for, it was intentionally sparse on instruction for actually getting around.  For more tactical planning, especially where Rules 1 and 2 were concerned, Jim Parker (www.caribbeanflyingadventures.com) was great.  His web site has suggestions for flying into and staying in any country in the Caribbean.  This included customs and immigration procedures (with copies of forms), availability of avgas (and current prices which are expensive), cash requirements (in many places that expensive gas is cash only), videos of approaches to each airport, and much more.  He was especially good with US customs and immigration procedures which we needed to use on three occasions on this trip.  Customs and immigration also drives a few decisions concerning the first and last place to land in some countries as not every air field has an office.  

There were other sites that are helpful as well.  Wikipedia, as always, had mostly good information on countries and sites to see.  The US State Department also has good information on what to expect with respect to security and other matters.  The Bahamas is extremely interested in making trips like this easy and enjoyable.  There are several sites that offer details for traveling in these islands.

Fuel, mandatory customs stops, and the comparative lack of anyplace dry to set down over most of the route, took some thinking.  There was relatively cheap gas in a few locations (Boringuen PR for one) and very expensive (some would say "high quality" -- not us, but some) gas in others.  This made it well worth taking a while to think through where we would fuel and how much to load.  I'd prepared a spreadsheet for our Western Trip a few years back.  The sheet came in handy.  Turned out there was only one place where we absolutely needed to get expensive fuel -- Inagua (Matthew Town) BH.  Also turned out that taking an hour or two to work through the fuel requirements saved nearly $500 compared to simply topping off everywhere with gas.  

With all that, we finally settled on an itinerary . . . 

. . . and a good thing, too.  We'd moved a long way away from the original chug-along idea, but in the end it was still an adventure.  Truth is, if you study any of the travels of real adventurers and explorers, the tiny amount of planning we put into this pales by comparison.  Those guys frequently found themselves in dire straights anyway.  All we wanted was a vacation, not a three hour tour (apologies to Gilligan and the Skipper ;-).  

What we got was a progressive tour of the Caribbean, starting with more austere (relatively speaking ;-) locations and building up to a posh few nights at a resort.