Thunderbirds are go!

Oh wow.  They've landed the space shuttle, with its mothership 747, in a corner of JFK airport in New York.  No one knows whether this is a resting space, a permanent fixture, a fair or a funeral.  And I gasped as mad Pepe wove his yellow cab (bald tyres and all) up the slipway towards Terminal 7.  The shuttle is big and clunky, full metal-jacketed and built in an age where rivets still commanded some authority.  Should the day come when our ipaded, soft electronic devices with their squishy compatibility go zap and burn out, I sense the shuttle will be wheeled out sedately to save the world.  It's sort of admirable, not beautfully designed like Concorde, but broad-shouldered.  A sort of Amtrak for the skies. 

A brief taste of Caribbean life

Thinnking back on it, there's no reason why bits of the Caribbean should not embrace the sort of fellow traveller one tries hard to avoid at Gibraltar and Gatwick airports. Both are near-seaside sorts of places. I think it must be the sea, or the ocean, but there was a dispiritng number of tattoed men with metal necklaces at the back of the plane to Antigua. They seem cash rich. And why not?  Didn't Long John Silver cavort much of his piratical life in that neck of the woods ("pieces of eight")?  And hasn't the Caribbean always been a smuggler's delight, from days of the US civil war, running blockades, to money centres of dubious repute in more recent times.

The Dominican Republic now caters for mainly a North American clientele; most of the Brits decamped our BA plane which docked briefly in Antigua and we carried on to Punta Cana (inbound flights galore from Miami, even Moscow).  I now understand the meaning of all-inclusive resort living,which first involves being awestruck by the bright photoshopped blue skies and white beaches on websites, trying to figure out where would be a nice place to stay.  Then the experience itself ends as a Truman Show of predictability, nice at first in a sticky cocktail way, like visiting Disney, no thinking is involved, just a vague mindlessness and safe for the kids. Eventually sand flies (which bite aggressively) are a reminder that it is no dream. It was not without relief to return to the wintry chill of a damp British Easter.