My friends arrived at around 11:30AM, after having spent the night in a hotel in Martinique. It turns out that 3 large passenger airplanes had been diverted and something over 1000 people had found themselves in Martinique during the height of the holiday season when hotel rooms are hard to find for just a family. Luckily my friends had arrived as the first airplane, or Air France had better connections, since they were put into a hotel while the others weren’t quite as fortunate and they had to sleep in school gyms and other mass shelters!
The only rental I could find was a Chevrolet that had been hit with a miniaturization beam from those Sci-fi films of old; while it had 4 doors and a hatchback I don’t know why they bothered since the interior was quite small and the engine had enough work just trucking me along; but somehow all 5 of us including baggage managed to fit into the car for the short trip back to the marina; but trying to accelerate onto the highway was a hair-raising experience with daytime French traffic.
Nonetheless we all made it unscathed onto the boat and after the baggage was safely stowed in their cabins we all got into the car again and drove up the mountainous roads on Basse-Terre to visit one of only 7 national parks of France (4 of which aren’t in France proper but overseas. The car had it’s work cut out for it and I made few friends in the line of traffic behind me, but we finally made it to our parking area and proceeded to take one of the shorter walks through the rainforest. The air was still and heavy, but luckily we were high up in the hills so the heat wasn’t oppressive and the path led us through a good cross-section of the forest’s flora, the fauna was lacking due to so many people passing through and I’m not sure I really wanted to encounter any of the creeping and crawling forest denizens on this walk.
After the forest walk we took a look at one of the pools and waterfalls, Silvia in particular took a closer look than she wanted and ended up going swimming instead – with no change of clothes aboard the car that was no fun for her at all; she got a shirt from her father and changed once we were back aboard the boat.
We relaxed for a bit aboard and tried to get an early dinner but it wasn’t quite early enough with the girls and then the rest of us coming close to falling asleep at the dinner table.
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |